Zimbabwe Crop Wild Relatives Digital Herbarium Interactive Web Application

The Zimbabwe Crop Wild Relatives Digital Herbarium is an open-access web application built around the Crop Wild Relatives collection held at the Zimbabwe National Herbarium and Botanic Garden (herbarium code: SRGH). It brings together 1,513 digitised herbarium specimens collected across Zimbabwe between 1902 and 2019, drawing on the work of more than 550 collectors over a century of botanical exploration.

The collection spans 314 historical and 54 modern administrative districts. To support spatial discovery, 580 records have been georeferenced using the Google Geocoding API together with Quarter Degree Square grid reference parsing. Altitude data, originally recorded in a mix of feet, metres, and numeric ranges, has been standardised to metres for 686 specimens. Every record carries a habitat classification under the IUCN framework, with both a descriptive label and a full IUCN category such as 1.5 Forest – Subtropical/Tropical Dry.

The application runs on a three-tier architecture. The frontend is a React and TypeScript single-page application built with Vite and served as static files by nginx. The backend is a Python FastAPI service with asynchronous database access, and the data layer is a PostgreSQL 17 database extended with PostGIS for spatial queries. Specimen images are stored on disk and served directly by the web server, while the database retains only image metadata.

Users can explore the collection through an interactive map with spatial filtering and per-specimen popups, a sortable table organised by species, collector, date, altitude, district, or habitat, and an image gallery linked to the underlying specimen records. Full-text search runs across species names, localities, habitat notes, and collector annotations. Filtering is available by historical or modern district, collector, date range, altitude range, and IUCN habitat class, and any filtered subset can be exported.

Records were transcribed from scanned herbarium specimen sheets and enriched through a standardisation pipeline that maps historical district names to current district names, parses legacy altitude strings, and assigns IUCN habitat categories. Each record carries its full provenance, including geographic locality, phenological state, altitude, habitat classification, and the original verbatim field notes.

The web application can be accessed via: https://cwr.africanplantgen…