Registro de Instituciones, Colecciones y Bases de Datos de Biodiversidad: Colección

The dataset includes 8937 records that covers genus Geranium the New World, providing an updated, taxonomically consistent and a sound geographical distribution of the 137 species of Geranium in America. These are the studied specimens on which following monograph was based: Aedo, Carlos (2012). Revision of Geranium (Geraniaceae) in the New World. Systematic Botany Monographs 95: 550p.

Besides the exhaustive taxonomic work done, and reflected in the dataset, a detailed revision of the locality of the specimens was performed, and geographic coordinates could be assigned with a 1 minute accuracy in c. 6500 records. Duplicate specimens kept in different collections have been aggregated into single records. Specimens from 128 herbaria were reviewed. These were supplemented by others collected during nine field trips, which allowed to know better the variability of characters within populations, and refine species distribution ranges. These expeditions took place in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, United States and Venezuela, and yielded 235 herbarium specimens of Geranium belonging to 46 species.

The potential for this dataset to be widely reused is very high, given the level of taxonomic and geographic scrutiny this dataset encompasses, its completeness, and the fact that Geranium is a well-known genus, widely used in horticulture and for pharmaceutical products.