The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
1. Department. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, are a world-leading public botanical research and horticulture organization with 700 staff including 200 in science and 75 affiliated researchers. The Kew Gardens, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site, are home to collections, laboratories, library and the Millennium Seed Bank (600 million seeds banked).
2. Expertise. It is an international centre devoted to increasing knowledge and understanding of plant diversity, with unrivalled collections, great depth and breadth of staff experience, and more than 7 million dried specimens and about 33,000 living plants built up over 200 years. Kew collaborates with institutions in over 50 countries, and is partner in several European FP6 Initiatives including NoE EDIT (European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy).
3. Main contributions of the team to the project: Building on the palm information portal (Palmweb) created through EDIT, RBG Kew will develop the necessary functionality for data on palm uses (with associated literature/specimen references) gathered in WP 7 - Compilation and organization of information to be delivered via Palm-web. RBG Kew is qualified to do this because it leads the palm exemplar group within EDIT, manages the Palmweb portal, cyber-taxonomy (through EDIT and NERC-funded CATE projects) and substantial capacity in IT and applications development. Through these projects KEW scientists will make a substantial contribution to PALMS which we have calculated to be 36.6 man-months or the equaivalent of 44% of the project cost to Kew. This contribution is, however, not included in the PALMS budget since it is funded by other sources. Additionally PALMS will have the support of Soraya Villaba and Dave Taylor for the accomodation of PALMS data into the palmweb portal which is a part of the project EDIT; both are 100% funded from other sources but importantly contribute to this project.
