01 Apr 2003

South Central China and Tibet: Hotspot of Diversity
The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, Jamaica Plain, MA, USA.
Self-description: "For over a century, Arboretum staff have explored and documented the natural and cultural resources of Asia. In 1924, a three-year expedition departed for one of the most unusual areas on earth - the first of many Arboretum expeditions to a region that is floristically one of the richest in the world. Seventy years later, other Arboretum expeditions returned to collect and inventory the flora. Today the Hengduan Mountain region, comprising western Sichuan and eastern Tibet (Xizang), is considered by international conservation organizations to be a hotspot of biodiversity, a term used to designate areas with a high number of endemic species (those found only in a single region) that are under severe threat of destruction due to human activities. Members of these expeditions returned to the Arboretum with seeds and live plants, dried herbarium specimens, stuffed birds, and images not only of plants but of people and landscapes as well. These web pages provide access to the natural history and ethnographic collections that resulted from these expeditions and are now held at Harvard University Herbaria, Museums, Libraries, and Archives. The digital format links these various repositories allowing students and scholars to move through time and within collections, accessing material that not only depicts the area's natural and ecological resources, but also documents the social and cultural history of China and Tibet."
Site contents: Expeditions; Researchers; Publications; Participating Institutions; Map and Gazetteer [1523 records with map grid numbers, place names (with Wade-Giles, Pinyin, Modern Chinese, and Tibetan equivalents when available), and geographical coordinates, geographic site type, and province (historic and modern) details - ed.]; Search Expedition Collections.
URL http://www.arboretum.harvard.edu/library/tibet/expeditions.html
Internet Archive (www.archive.org) [the site was not archived at the time of this abstract.]
Link reported by: Raymond Lum (rlum[use"@"]fas.harvard.edu)
* Resource type [news - documents - study - corporate info. - online guide]: Documents
* Publisher [academic - business - govt. - library/museum - NGO - other]: Library
* Scholarly usefulness [essential - v.useful - useful - interesting - marginal]: V.Useful
* External links to the resource [over 3,000 - under 3,000 - under 1,000 - under 300 - under 100 - under 30]: under 30