Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden signs first Benefit Sharing Agreement

Plant samples from the Alberto Castellanos herbarium are being restored, digitized and made available.

The RB herbarium at the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden is adding a scientific collection of great importance to the country to its collection and making it available online. These are plant samples from the Alberto Castellanos herbarium (GUA), of the now defunct Rio de Janeiro State Foundation for Environmental Engineering (FEEMA), which are being restored and digitized, and can be consulted for free online.

The project will initially include 35,000 samples from this historic collection, which contains flora collected by botanists and naturalists in the Tijuca Forest and on the state's sandbanks. Some of these habitats have already disappeared.

Because of the Botanical Garden's experience in safeguarding and publishing data on scientific collections, the State Environment Institute (INEA) donated the GUA's collection - around 70,000 herborized plant samples (exsiccates) - to the RB herbarium in 2017. Since then, they have been stored in an air-conditioned environment, awaiting funds to be incorporated into the JBRJ collection, which is now being done with the Benefit Sharing Agreement. The samples can be consulted in person by researchers and online by society as a whole, using the JABOT and Reflora systems.

This is the first Non-Monetary Benefit Sharing Agreement (ARB-NM) made with a research and teaching institution since the enactment of Law 13.123/2015, known as the Biodiversity Law. It provides, among other things, that companies that commercially exploit products derived from the genetic heritage of Brazilian biodiversity or associated traditional knowledge must share the benefits of this exploitation with society. In this case, L'Oréal Brasil chose to share the benefits with the project to restore, computerize and disseminate the first batch of samples from the GUA herbarium.

Benefit sharing is provided for in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), an international treaty to which Brazil is a signatory.

The funds from the agreement between the JBRJ and the company will be managed by the Foundation for the Support of the Development of Scientific Computing - FAAC.