The Werner Rauh Heritage Project

Prof. Werner Rauh (1913–2000) studied Botany, Zoology, Chemistry and Geology at Leipzig, Innsbruck and Halle (Saale). In 1956 he was appointed as associate Professor of Botany at Heidelberg University. In 1960 he became full Professor and Director of the newly established «Institut für Systematische Botanik und Pflanzengeographie», until 2010 Heidelberg Institute for Plant Science (HIP), now part of Centre for Organismal Studies (COS Heidelberg). He held this position until he retired in 1981 and beyond that until 1982.

During his time as director and in his retirement until 1994, he made more than 36 expeditions, mainly to South- and Central-America, as well as to the south of Africa and particularly to Madagascar. From these journeys, he took innumerable plants to the Botanical Gardens Heidelberg, especially succulents, bromeliads and orchids, which are a valuable part of today's living collection and of the Herbarium (HEID). During his expeditions he scribed in total 195 booklets with detailed information not only about the plants collected, but on vegetation and geology of the regions he visited as well as ethnological observations. More than 18,000 hand written pages with nearly 40,000 entries, hardly accessible for research, were scanned between 2008 and 2011 and were processed within «The Werner Rauh Heritage Project».

The heart of the project is a relational database to store the heterogenous information found in the field books and diaries, as well as to link it to a clear taxonomy and to the garden's database. A number of powerful tools have been developed to enable researchers to search the database for information like collected taxa by name, Rauh's field numbers and the place of collection etc. The central parts of the database are a look-up table with the itineraries of Werner Rauh's journeys (geographical points to be found in his field notes, with the taxa collected or observed) and another table with the taxa entries (all taxa with a field number noted in the field books). Tables with synonyms and basionyms and protologue data are included as well as links to other taxonomic databases, e.g. IPNI and TROPICOS.

From 2009 to 2016 the project has been funded by Klaus Tschira Stiftung gGmbH.