The Brunei Times/Asia News Network Asia One 23 May 11;
BRUNEI's Forestry Department is "looking forward" to pairing with Singaporean authorities in updating the Sultanate's database of plant species, an official told The Brunei Times yesterday.
However, the head of Brunei's national herbarium, where preserved plant specimens are stored for data and research purposes, did not specify any dates but said that the bilateral collaboration has already been agreed upon.
Deputy Forestry Director Mahmud Hj Yussof confirmed that the tie-up was with the Singapore Botanic Gardens but also did not disclose a timeline.
Brunei last inventoried its flora database, under the "Chief List of Flowering Plant and Gynosperm", in 1996 with the help of the United Kingdom's Royal Botanic Gardens.
It was estimated that Brunei was home to around 5,000 plant species. To date, 3,955 species have been documented (including 3,567 "higher plant" species), said the head of the national herbarium, who asked not to be named.
The herbarium, internationally recognised by the acronym BRUN, sited at the Brunei Forestry Centre in Sg Liang, currently houses a total of about 30,000 specimens.
Brunei has already started using an Oxford University-developed online platform for the herbarium, known as the Botanical Research and Herbarium Management System (BRAHMS). This was still "in the early stage of development" with the Singapore Herbarium (SING) of the city-state's Botanic Gardens, a press release from the Forestry Department said yesterday.
SING has been using Brahms since 2000 to "computerise" its plant collection data, it said on its website. In comparison, the herbarium has 650,000 specimens, including material from Brunei and the rest of the Malesian region, (Peninsular Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, the Philippines and New Guinea) and adjacent areas (East Asia, mainland SE Asia, and the Southwest Pacific), "with the most extensive collections from Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia dating from the 1880s". "Out of these, about 6,800 are type specimens," SING said.
A member of the BRAHMS advisory group was invited to speak at the Ministry of Industry and Primary Resources (MIPR) yesterday on plant data collection methods and the online system.
Addressing the MIPR Permanent Secretary, Dato Paduka Dr Hj Mohd Amin Liew Abdullah, diplomats, government officials, private sector representatives and scholars, was Dr William Hawthorne of Oxford's Department of Plant Sciences who presented a talk on "Hotspot Measurement and Biodiversity Management in Brunei, Heart of Borneo (HoB)".
He spoke of the advantages of a technique known as Rapid Botanic Survey (RBS), where individuals including students can be trained to take up to 1,500 specimens and label images per day.
The process involves the scientists collecting leaves and other parts of a plant, and using newspapers to press-dry the specimens before they are housed in the herbarium.
Emphasis will be given on "bioquality", which measures the concentration of species based on rarity. These will then be categorised using a system of colour-coded stars, that can later map out flora "hotspots" within the country and thus, determine Brunei's "temperature" compared to the region.
The stars' colours can be used to depict whether a species was "widespread" Southeast Asia or was endemic to Brunei, based on the survey project's criteria.
"With this type of database (technique), we will soon be able to see how various bits of Brunei compare to bits (of hotspots) of the world," Hawthorne said.
-The Brunei Times/Asia News Network
