Architectural analysis of tropical trees is a recent approach to understanding the structural diversity and evolution of trees. To contribute to the acknowledgement of architectural analyses, ArchiWood provides a large dataset of wood anatomy and morpho-architectural traits of plant species in Madagascar.
The ArchiWood dataset covers 250 natural and endemic plant species of 40 orders, 244 genera and 102 families, with most of the data indexed from high resolution digitized wood slides and fieldwork documents that have never been published previously.
This dataset may be useful to enhance biodiversity knowledge and to promote accessibility to the scientific heritage of wood collection and fieldwork documents from one of the tropical biodiversity hotspots.
ArchiWood dataset contains more than 3,600 digitized documents along with 5 metadata CSV files.
For each species, 3 anatomical slides for radial, tangential and transverse sections.
Illustrations from digitized field notebooks.
Scanned photographs at 24 x 36 mm format.
Descriptive notes from digitized field notebooks.
Associated descriptive metadata were specifically produced for the aim of ArchiWood and aggregated from various sources by CIRAD’s researchers, experts in their respective fields. All metadata were taken from international standards.
Anatomy metadata is specific and codified by IAWA (International Association of Wood Anatomists).
Morphology metadata is 15 morpho-architectural traits defined by Hallé & Oldeman (1970), Hallé et al. (1978) and Barthélémy & Caraglio (2007).
Full description of metadata is included in the dataset.
ArchiWood dataset is licensed to the public under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0
Suggested citation for this dataset:
Azizan, A., Guillon, E., Caraglio, Y., Langbour, P., Paradis, S., Bonnet, P., Brohard, Y., Heinz, C., Boutahar, N., Brancheriau, L. (2016). ArchiWood: collection of digitized documents constituting a unique database on the botanical characteristics of numerous species from Madagascar. CIRAD. doi:10.18167/archiwood/1
Other citation styles (APA, Harvard, BibTeX, ...) provided by DataCite
CIRAD has many legacy data and documents of scientific interest. Many of these data being analog (like fieldbooks, photos, physical samples, etc.), their sharing and dissemination to the scientific community first requires a digitization process.
The call for project in digitization launched by the BSN (a French institutional digital library) was an opportunity to focus on a particular collection: our wood collection called xylotheque. Due to its volume it was too ambitious to digitize all its content. A panel of experts undertook to identify a remarkable subset of the collection, and quickly targetted a region with significant biological diversity and little information available about different aspects of wood: Madagascar. Indeed the island of Madagascar has a remarkable diversity of flora and a very high level of endemism, making it a permanent laboratory for the study of mechanisms of the evolution.
All the tasks of ArchiWood project were carried out by a CIRAD team of experts in anatomy and architecture of plants: