Notícias
Reflora calls for applications for a sandwich scholarship abroad with CNPq fund
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Applications for a CNPq Sandwich Scholarship Abroad (SWE) under the project Advances in the Partnership between the REFLORA Program and the Natural History Museum of Vienna are open from January 30 to February 20, 2024.
An initiative of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), coordinated by the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden (JBRJ), the Reflora Virtual Herbarium has revolutionized research into Brazilian flora, making available online images and data from millions of exsiccates (plant samples) collected in Brazil and held in the collections of foreign and Brazilian herbaria.
In its first decade of existence, completed last year, HV Reflora digitized and published online more than 3.8 million samples of Brazilian plants, fungi and algae. Also in 2023, it received a new grant of around R$1.5 million from CNPq to hire fellows. This second call for proposals is part of this initiative.
The current project continues the digitization of samples from the W herbarium at the Natural History Museum in Vienna and was conceived as part of the celebrations for the 200th anniversary of Brazil's independence. The reason is that important naturalists who made expeditions to Brazilian territory in the 19th century came as part of the so-called "Austrian mission". This was part of the entourage of the then princess and future empress Leopoldina, wife of Pedro I, who came from Austria in 1817.
According to the coordinator of HV Reflora, researcher Rafaela Campostrini Forzza, many samples from the W herbarium still need to be sought out and are not digitized, so the work needs to be done by fellows who are used to dealing with herbaria. The expectation is to digitally repatriate between 15,000 and 20,000 images in the two years of the project, as well as transcribe the data from the labels of all the more than 50,000 digitized samples. As well as angiosperms, this stage of the work also focuses on exsiccates of bryophytes (the group to which mosses belong), fungi and algae.