Saint-Hilaire virtual herbarium, a new upgradeable tool to study Brazilian botany

The new Franco-Brazilian website “Saint-Hilaire virtual herbarium” offers dynamic online consultation of all specimens and manuscripts of the naturalist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, providing links between specimen images and associated textual data, including notes available in his field books. This tool aims at facilitating the work of taxonomy and systematic botany and allowing a more accurate reconstruction of the routes and time frame of Saint-Hilaire’s exploration. All specimens are being digitized by the Paris herbarium (P) and added online. The system will also offer Saint-Hilaire’s major publications online. The nomenclature and determinations are automatically updated through dynamic links to the SONNERAT/MNHN database. In this paper, we propose moreover a standard for the correct citation of Saint-Hilaire specimens.