ArchiWood: dataset of legacy documents about wood anatomical, morphological, and architectural traits for plant species in Madagascar

Abstract

Digitization of a part of CIRAD's' xylotheque, one of the most important collections of tropical timber in the world, now allows researchers, experts in the field, trainers and archaeologists to have a new source of homogenized information. This corpus constitutes a unique database on the botanical characteristics of many species of Madagascar and could feed the research in both ecological and systematic fields by the possibility to define traits and criteria usable for example in phylogeny or functional ecology.

The island of Madagascar presents a remarkable floristic diversity, with a very high rate of endemism, making it a permanent laboratory for the study of the mechanisms governing evolution.

The digitization project was conducted in close coordination with other projects currently underway involving the same partners. 995 species are concerned by the ArchiWood project: 3 planes of anatomical sections for each species, associated with a total of 100 field notebooks (architectural sketches) and 20,000 slides.

Contents

This dataset is composed of digitized legacy documents, all related to Madagascar biodiversity:

• More than 2,300 illustrations and notes taken from field notebooks
• More than 1,200 anatomical cuts
• More than 70 photographs of plants and landscapes

Methods

Digitization of anatomical cuts
For each species, there are 3 anatomical cuts associated with the 3 planes of symmetry of the material: radial, tangential and longitudinal. Each cut was scanned using an Olympus DP71 digital camera fitted on an Olympus BX60 microscope. The shooting software that drives the camera is Archimed from Microvision Instruments. The image format is 24 bits colored TIFF. Each image is 1600 x 1200 pixels for 3 different magnifications of the microscope: x40 (overview of the cut), x200 (main features anatomical from IAWA), x400 (highlighting fine lines such as punctuations).

Digitization of sketches (from field notebooks)
The digitized information in the field notebooks is made up of architectural sketches (with descriptive notes). The slides include additional remarkable visual information of field sketches (flowers, fruits, overview, geographical implantation conditions…). The sketches were scanned using a resolution of 300 dpi, 24 bits colors in JPEG format.

Digitization of photographs (24 x 36 mm)
The photographs were scanned at 600 dpi, 24 bits colors in JPEG format.

File management and data quality control

Controlling images and adding metadata operations were carried out by the researchers concerned in their field of activity (anatomy, botany, architecture). The homogenization and final harmonization of the metadata and data was carried out by the data manager.