The state Herbarium is the repository for the plant samples collected from the Desert Discovery Inc Botany Team. Plant samples have to be fresh and contain the material necessary for a species identification, usually flowers and leaves but also fruit where possible. Photographs are also provided to support the identification process.
The Herbarium prefers enough plant material for 2 or 3 specimen sheets, both as insurance for a nice specimen sheet but the remainder is available for perhaps destructive sampling (eg DNA analysis) or contributing to a research project. The final option is to donate a specimen to another herbarium.
The Herbarium usually provide plant presses and cardboard for the plant specimens. These are collected and returned by the those living in that city. The DD collection data is entered into a suitable format for inclusion into the Herbariums database and label generation programs.
Preparations prior to heading off to the Project have evolved to now using recorded plant lists for the Desert Discovery Project Area from the Atlas of Living Australia. This allows for the collection of photographs of most of the plant species likely to be encountered. The Botany Team endeavour to identify the plant species in the field to allow a check list to be maintained and reduce the number of duplicates being sampled.
Google Earth Satellite imagery allows the terrain and plant growth imagery to be used to plan target areas well before getting to the Project site. The North Australian Fire Information website allows the fire history of the site to be included in the assessment of suitable plant collection sites.
Collections are made from more sites rather than intensely sampling only a few sites. Two or three sites are commonly surveyed on day trips from the base camp. Previous projects have had single or multiple base camps.
The Botany team use Starlink to load in-field images of plants to iNaturalist in the afternoon/evenings and this allows the team to have identifications confirmed or corrected.