CoLUPSIA Seram Island Herbarium Collection

Quality assurance
FTA’s Herbarium Collection have been peer-reviewed to ensure that they meet CGIAR’s ‘quality of research for development’ (QoR4D) framework. This framework, developed with strong methodological contributions from FTA, comprises criteria for relevance, credibility, legitimacy and effectiveness.

Relevance
The Herbarium Collection have been independently evaluated as contributing to a well-defined research question important to forests, trees and agroforestry, and to FTA’s Theory of Change. The SWAMP datasets also contribute new knowledge on forests, trees and agroforestry.

Credibility
The credibility of the Herbarium Collection has been externally verified. The datasets belong to FTA partners – and can be used by FTA.

The Herbarium Collection have been generated through a rigorous research design; they are complete, curated and cleaned. The datasets, the underlying methods and related findings are robust, and sources of knowledge are dependable and sound.

Legitimacy
The Herbarium Collection have been assessed as meeting the criteria for legitimacy. Data have been collected following both Free Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) and the research ethics guidelines of FTA, ensuring the underlying research process is fair and ethical and perceived as such, including proper representation of all involved and consideration of interests and perspectives of intended users.

Effectiveness
The Herbarium Collection and services are accessible and well positioned for uptake and use (by researchers and stakeholders), including capacity development and proper support to the enabling environment. Herbarium Collection on the FTA website are also available and accessible on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) interoperable repository site, Dataverse. Data are also described by sufficient metadata (Darwin-Core).