Begonia Species Bank and Hybrid Collection, Fort Worth Botanic Garden: living specimen images (collection index)

Photographs of living plants in the Begonia Species Bank and Hybrid Collection at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden in Fort Worth, Texas. The collection was established in the 1970s and is accredited through the Plant Collections Network of the American Public Gardens Association. Begonias in the wild often face loss of habitat, and the garden describes the collection as insurance against their extinction.

The images come from the Begonia Scientific Photography Project, launched in 2023 by the Begonia Collection Curator and the Living Collections Director to visually document the entire collection. Not everyone who wants to study the collection can visit in person, and the project aims to open it to researchers working offsite, to educators and students, and to anyone curious about begonias. Plants are brought to the photo studio as they come into flower, with priority given to species and to U-numbered plants (wild-collected begonias not yet formally named, tracked by a number assigned by the American Begonia Society). Each image is captured at high resolution to show the plant's botanical anatomy, with attention to the diagnostic features taxonomists use to identify species. Images are made by focus stacking and then edited by hand, and whole plants are photographed against both white and black backgrounds. For select plants, edited images are assembled into labeled morphology plates.

This record is the umbrella for the collection's image sets. Each plant (a specimen, identified by its accession number, for example FWBG-2025-1022-A) is published as its own record containing whole-plant portraits, detail images of plant parts, and a composite plate, together with metadata about the images and the plant. Every specimen record points back to this one.

This record holds no images. It contains image-index.csv, a table with one row per image across all published specimen records (species, specimen, image type, plant part, date, file name, checksum and a download link), so images can be filtered, for example by species, and downloaded from the specimen records. index-registry.csv lists the specimen records the index was built from. datapackage.json describes these files.

New specimens are added over time. Each addition is a new version of this record, so its concept DOI always points to the latest index, and each version has its own DOI. Each specimen record states its own licence and how to cite it. To cite the collection as a whole, cite this record's concept DOI.