New Zealand has a pteridophyte flora of about 230 species. The aim of this project is to fully describe and catalogue all the species of pteridophytes occurring in New Zealand, to maintain a comprehensive collection of them at Te Papa, and to provide a regularly updated checklist.
The genus Hebe is one of New Zealand’s largest and most distinctive groups of native plants, with around a hundred known species. They occur in most habitats from the coast to the alpine zone, and cultivated forms are frequently grown in suburban gardens.
The 'genomic revolution' has produced methods of DNA analysis that have contributed significantly to our understanding of the world’s biodiversity. These methods are being used in this project to investigate several aspects of pteridophyte diversity in New Zealand.
Over the last forty years, biographical information about early New Zealand botanists, details of their collections, and the places that they visited in the course of collecting have been routinely accumulated by herbarium staff.
As part of Te Papa’s ongoing collaborative research on Hebe and related genera, our current research on Chionohebe aims to use DNA sequencing and AFLP fingerprinting techniques on numerous collections sampled throughout Australia and New Zealand