aRboretum, an R package for making plant knowledge accessible, to be featured in lecture on June 23

Graduate student Martin Boucknooghe (University of Montpellier) will present the lecture “aRboretum project: making plant taxonomic and distributional knowledge accessible through an automated R pipeline” on Tuesday, June 23, at 2 p.m., in the auditorium of the Scientific Research Directorate (Dipeq) at the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden.

The lecture will introduce aRboretum, a free and open-source R package currently under development that is designed to generate interactive HTML labels for botanical collections, arboreta, botanical gardens, and living plant collections. The project aims to make plant knowledge more accessible to the public by streamlining the production of digital labels and promoting the use of reliable information.

The package integrates data from authoritative sources such as Flora e Funga do Brasil and Plants of the World Online, automatically retrieving taxonomic and distributional information, resolving synonyms, generating descriptions in multiple languages, incorporating audio resources, and producing interactive species distribution maps.

In addition to automated data retrieval, aRboretum allows users to dynamically update and manually add relevant information, making labels more flexible, customizable, and tailored to the needs of each collection. As a result, the tool goes beyond simply reproducing information mined from databases, serving instead as a platform that facilitates the compilation, enrichment, and dissemination of taxonomic, distributional, and curatorial knowledge.

Martin Boucknooghe is a master's student in Biology, Ecology and Evolution at the University of Montpellier. He is currently undertaking an internship at the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden under the supervision of researcher Domingos Cardoso, as part of the aRboretum project.

 Event Information

Lecture: aRboretum project: making plant taxonomic and distributional knowledge accessible through an automated R pipeline
Speaker: Martin Boucknooghe (University of Montpellier)
Date: June 23, 2026
Time: 2 p.m. Event Information
Venue: Auditorium of the Scientific Research Directorate (Dipeq)
Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden – 915 Pacheco Leão Street, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.