Harnessing herbarium collections to fill global genetic data shortfalls

Around the world, over 400 million pressed and preserved plant specimens are housed in institutions called Herbaria. These collections date back over 500 years and are from all over the globe, making the data they provide essential to our understanding of plant diversity. 

Increasingly, researchers are interested in using the data stored in these collections to better understand how past and ongoing global change is impacting plant diversity. To that end, one promising application of these historical collections involves extracting and sequencing the genetic material preserved in the physical specimens to better understand and monitor change in plant genetic composition and diversity.     

To address this knowledge gap, we quantitatively assessed our ability to reconstruct populations of specimens, from the herbarium record, which could be sequenced to calculate population-level metrics of standard genetic Essential Biodiversity Variables.  

Surprisingly, our analysis shows that herbarium collections can be used to reconstruct over 162 thousand historical populations across over 41 thousand plant species, and spanning the past 250 years of global change. Mobilizing the genetic data stored in the specimens that comprise these reconstructed populations would transform our understanding of plant diversity and hugely benefit efforts to monitor genetic change globally.     

Explore the populations we reconstructed below!