Ozan Şentürk (Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh), Burçin Çıngay (Flora Research Association) and Ilgın Deniz Can (Flora of Türkiye) visited the Herbarium at the BIAA premises in Ankara to study samples in preparation for future publication.
The BIAA Herbarium (Index Herbariorum: BIA) hosts approximately 4,500 specimens of vascular plants, wild and cultivated cereals, and other crops collected during BIAA projects. It is part of a larger Botanical Reference Collection, which also includes Wood and Charcoal samples, all of which were fully digitised in 2020. A Modern Seed Reference Collection is also part of the botanical reference collection and helps researchers to identify their archaeobotanical samples.
On December 4th, 2025, botanists and illustrators of the “Resimli Türkiye Florası” Project visited the Herbarium to study the collection and, in particular, the Poaceae and Fabaceae families. The outcomes of this study visit will be published in a volume of the Resimli Türkiye Florası series.
If you are interested in the BIAA Botanical Reference Collection or other collections, including planning a study visit, please see the details here: https://biaa.ac.uk/digital-repository/.
The Botanical Reference Collection was first established by Gordon Charles Hillman (1943-2018) between 1970 and 1974. Approximately 4,500 specimens were collected, primarily by Hillman, with assistance from several students. At the same time, most of the wood specimens were collected by George Willcox. Until the mid-1990s, improvements and additions to the botanical collection, and the identification of Hillman’s herbarium specimens, were made by several scholars, including Mark Nesbitt (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), Delwen Samuel (King’s College London), Julian Scott, and Fred Rumsey (Natural History Museum).