Princess Astrid of Belgium visits Rio de Janeiro's Botanical Garden

Princess Astrid of Belgium, who is leading a Belgian economic mission to the country, visited the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden on November 28, 2024. Welcomed by the institution's president, Sergio Besserman Vianna, the princess saw the jequitibá and peroba trees planted in the arboretum in 1920 by her great-grandparents, Queen Elisabeth and King Albert I, respectively, as well as a specimen of the chuva-de-ouro planted by King Leopold III, her grandfather, in 1962.

The Belgian delegation's visit also included the signing of a letter of intent between the Botanical Gardens of Rio and Meise, in Belgium, for the repatriation of images of Brazilian plant samples collected by European naturalists in Brazil in the 19th century. The agreement was signed as part of the Reflora Project. The Plantentuin Meise collection is one of the most important in Europe. The signing of the letter of intent is aimed at a future cooperation agreement between the institutions.

The idea is to repatriate approximately 57,000 images, most of them historical collections, including samples from the collection of the naturalist Von Martius, used in the first publication of Flora Brasiliensis in 1840. In the book, more than 20,000 species of Brazilian plants were described for the first time, making it one of the largest and most complete floras in the world. Thus, the collection deposited at the Belgian institution is of great importance to Brazilian botany.

According to the president of the JBRJ, in addition to the Reflora partnership, an agreement will also be signed with the Wagralim Institute, a Belgian food innovation group.

- When we talk about bioeconomy, or agroforestry, it's not traditional monoculture agriculture with pesticides. Here there is a whole biodiversity that welcomes that plant, makes it thrive and doesn't parasitize it. This also includes an assessment of the change in young people's eating habits. The Botanical Garden will provide knowledge of plants, and also learn from them various aspects - explained Besserman Vianna, highlighting the special knowledge of the Atlantic Forest at the Rio Botanical Garden.

The story of the Reflora Virtual Herbarium began in 2010, when the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden Research Institute was given the task of building the system and hosting it. The platform, developed in partnership with Coppe/UFRJ, was launched in September 2013 and revolutionized research into Brazilian flora. At the time, Reflora had images and data from 420,000 specimens of Brazilian plants, made available online from the collections of two European herbaria and the herbarium of the Rio Botanical Garden. More than a decade later, HV Reflora brings together 99 partner herbaria, with around 4.6 million images of specimens available on its platform.

Physical herbaria are made up of plant samples collected by researchers on their field expeditions and prepared for storage and study, called exsiccates. Until the beginning of the 20th century, many foreign naturalists made collections in Brazil and took them to herbaria in other countries. Thus, in order to study a group of plants, it was common for Brazilian researchers to have to travel to these institutions abroad, at great expense of time and financial resources.

HV Reflora has radically changed this picture, digitally repatriating and providing internet access to the high-resolution images of millions of samples. It also encompasses the collections of various herbaria throughout Brazil. This has accelerated the work of botanists and enabled important advances in the field.

Today, HV Reflora is widely used by researchers to record new species for science, distribution studies, taxonomy and phylogeny, work to assess the risk of species extinction, plant identification, drawing up lists, among many other uses and applications.