Guide

The Global Pollen Project is an online platform that facilitates the storage and organisation of pollen images which can be accessed freely and globally. Its framework has been specifically designed to encompass: access, transparency and uniformity going forward through time.

There are two main concepts for which the Global Pollen Project can be used for: (1) the identification of unknown grains, and (2) as a morphological reference collection.

1. If a user has a pollen grain that he/she can not identify then they may upload it to the Global Pollen Project for a crowd sourced identification here. The quality of the identification is mediated by our identification model. Once an unknown grain has satisfied the criteria of the identification model it is passed into the master reference collection.
2. The master reference collection is comprised of images of material from known botanical sources as well as morphologically identified images. This reference collection may be used to help identify unknown grains. A user may also contribute their own collections to be used as reference material here.

We hope that this tool will promote increased research and help share expertise to encourage people to tackle palynological research in more challenging parts of the world producing higher resolution taxonomic identifications and studies. In doing so we also hope to bridge the gap between the modern and palaeo scientific spheres. We aim to progress the palynological discipline further towards a digital age, disseminating data freely and easily, tackling dark data, and providing a tool which can be used to educate in research, schools and amateur hobbyists.

Taxonomic Backbone

Taxonomic organisation has been implemented through a hierarchical system to relate submitted pollen images to their corresponding species, genera and families. The taxonomy is constrained such that the higher taxonomic ranks are required for a genus or species. New taxa are created automatically when a new user-submitted grain becomes identified, or a slide is digitised for a new taxon. To overcome taxonomic conflicts between collections, we implemented a dynamic taxonomic backbone. This is linked directly to The Plant List (2013), requiring that any new taxon generated in the Global Pollen Project must exist on The Plant List as an accepted taxon. Synonyms will not be accepted and must be inputted in accordance with current convention. This ensures that our taxonomic hierarchy is rigorous and up to date with the global authority on plant nomenclature (The Plant List, 2013).

Master Reference Collection

The reference collection is a dynamic library of all taxonomically-verified pollen images held by the pollen project, including:

• Digitised reference slides. These have been uploaded by a contributing institution. If you use these images, please include the full attribution given on the page.
• Individual grains that have become identified. The analysis is currently running, with data being computed. The report is also compiled during this process.

You can browse the collection by family, genera, and species, and navigate between taxa using the taxonomic heirarchy.

The Taxon View

The taxon view displays all reference slides for the taxon selected. This includes slides that belong to taxa that are children of the current selection, for example all species within a genera.

There are four information panels displayed for every taxon:

Digitised Reference Slides

Present and Past Geographical Distributions

Botanical Description

Statistics

Identify Pollen Grains

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