L’herbier Daniel Pellé (DP) – La collection d’un botaniste amateur de l’Aube (France)

Daniel Pellé (-1989) was an inspector of the PTT in Troyes and an amateur botanist. From 1942 to 1989, he harvested plants in the department of Aube, in France in a more general way and abroad during his holidays. Daniel Pellé collected nearly 2000 specimens and assembled as many herbarium plates, advised and assisted in his task by the botanist René Prin, founder of the Société auboise naturaliste, and collector of about 250 of the plates in this herbarium. The herbarium itself contains 1983 plates, precisely dated and located. 1974 plates were digitized and computerized by the authors of this article (EC and SL), the herbarium having been transmitted to them by Daniel Pellé’s wife and son in 2008; the nine remaining plates, having no labels, were discarded from the final data set. The specimens of 133 taxonomic families are distributed in 32 folders, the majority of the collections coming from the Aube department (Champagne-Ardenne, Grand-Est, France). The collections range from 1942 to 1989, i.e., from the post-war period until the death of Daniel Pellé. During this period, botanists did not do much herbarium work, which makes his collection even more interesting. 64 plates were recovered via the French Society for the Exchange of Vascular Plants (SFE), and their duplicates in the Paris Herbarium were found. Daniel Pellé’s herbarium has been declared in the Index Herbariorum, and bears the acronym “DP”. It is now housed in the collections of the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de Troyes (Aube, France). All the specimens in the herbarium were studied by Christophe Reveillard, botanist at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle and third author of this article. The determinations made by Daniel Pellé and René Prin have thus proved to be accurate for most of them. Although the physical herbarium is now housed in the collections of the city of Troyes, the aim of this publication is to make known – but also to perpetuate – the digital content of the DP herbarium, by including in the article the plates of the herbarium and their metadata, in the form of a complete catalogue of the plates. The approach taken by the authors of the article to computerize the herbarium is also described, as well as the procedure for compiling the catalogue. Finally, it is a tribute to Daniel Pellé, who died in tragic circumstances.