Herbarium collections remain essential in the age of community science
How important are the world's ~400 million herbarium specimens?
s41467-024-51899-1.pdfIn Canada and around the world, herbaria store millions of preserved plant specimens, representing hundreds of thousands of species spanning hundreds of years of recent history. While these enormous collections have already contributed to our understanding of plant diversity today - through their use in systematics and taxonomics - how important are these collections to the modern study of biodiversity? And more specifically, how to herbarium specimens compare to other sources of biodiversity data such as community science observations?
What did we find?
Both herbarium specimens and community science observations record biodiversity data, but they differ in exactly what types of data they record and what this data can be used for! We found that, in terms of their ability to capture the diversity and distribution of plant life, herbarium records are less prone to the biases that pervade community science records.
(Above) Here, we show that herbarium records are less temporally (a) and spatially (b) biased and their density is less dependent on human population density (c).
(Above) These maps show the spatial distribution of record density for herbarium and community science data.
What does this mean for conservation?
In order to be useful to researchers and conservationists, biodiversity records need to represent both the diversity of species as well as their distributions in space. We found that herbarium records, despite being far less numerous, capture more taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity than community science observations. Furthermore, because they are less spatially biased, herbarium records more efficiently represent and capture species' geographic distributions and environmental niches.
(Left) Herbarium records are far less numerous but capture more diversity!
Using accumulation models, we show that the digitization of Canada's remaining specimens would greatly enhance our understanding of plant diversity in Canada - potentially quintupling our ability to model species geographic distributions - and improving our ability to incorporate biodiversity and climate change into conservation planning.
Conclusions
As nations strive to reach their 2030 and 2050 conservation goals, the availability and coverage of biodiversity data they use to inform conservation policy may well determine the future of biodiversity on Earth
We show that investing in the mass digitization of Earth's herbarium specimens is a efficient and feasible way to generate new biodiversity data that is less biased and more representative of the diversity and distribution of life on Earth.
As such, empowering our remaining herbaria would not only preserve irreplaceable knowledge, skills, and specimens but might also hold the key to producing the critical biodiversity data we need to predict and protect Earth’s biodiversity now and into the future.
