Herbarium collections shape our understanding of the world’s flora and are crucial for addressing global change and biodiversity conservation. The formation of such natural history collections, however, are not free from sociopolitical issues of immediate relevance. Despite increasing efforts addressing issues of representation and colonialism in natural history collections, herbaria have received comparatively less attention. While it has been noted that the majority of plant specimens are housed in the global North, the extent of this disparity has not been rigorously quantified to date. Here, by analyzing over 85 million specimen records and surveying herbaria across the globe, we assess the colonial legacy of botanical collections and how we may move towards a more inclusive future. We demonstrate that colonial exploitation has contributed to an inverse relationship between where plant biodiversity exists in nature and where it is housed in herbaria. Such disparities persist in herbaria across physical and digital realms despite overt colonialism having ended over half a century ago, suggesting ongoing digitization and decolonization efforts have yet to alleviate colonial-era discrepancies. We emphasize the need for acknowledging the inconvenient history of herbarium collections and the implementation of a more equitable, global paradigm for their collection, curation, and use.
In 1950, Holttum placed species from Malaysia in the cardamom genus, Elettaria, while noting that they may, in fact, belong elsewhere in the tribe Alpinieae. We tested this hypothesis applying phylogenetic methods using nuclear ITS and At103, and plastid matK, ndhF and trnL-F sequences from several samples of the genus. In the resulting molecular phylogeny, these samples appeared in three separate places of the Alpinieae. Elettaria s.str. is endemic in India and Sri Lanka while all species from Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra and Borneo are placed in a new genus, Sulettaria which, furthermore, includes six species with basionyms in Amomum, A. kandariense from Sulawesi and the other five from Borneo. Fifteen new combinations are made, an identification key provided and lectotypes designated for three species. Plants labelled as cardamom and exhibited in some botanic gardens have been misidentified and represent a species in the Alpinia zerumbet clade.
Zingiber Mill. is distributed from India to the Pacific but only a few species are known from east of Wallace's Line, whereas the area to the west is rich in species. A recent collection from limestone at Bantimurung, South Sulawesi, Indonesia represents a new eastern species, Zingiber ultralimitale Ardiyani & A.D.Poulsen, which is described, illustrated, and barcoded using three of the four barcoding loci (rbcL, trnH-psbA and ITS). Placement of this species using morphological evidence is ambiguous but a combination of evidence from morphology, pollen anatomy and molecular analysis indicates that it belongs to Zingiber sect. Zingiber.
The advent of the DNA sequencing age has led to a revolution in biology. The rapid and cost‐effective generation of high‐quality sequence data has transformed many fields, including those focused on discovering species and surveying biodiversity, monitoring movement of biological materials, forensic biology, and disease diagnostics. There is a need to build capacity to generate useful sequence data in countries with limited historical access to laboratory resources, so that researchers can benefit from the advantages offered by these data. Commonly used molecular techniques such as DNA extraction, PCR, and DNA sequencing are within the reach of small laboratories in many countries, with the main obstacles to successful implementation being lack of funding and limited practical experience. Here we describe a successful approach that we developed to obtain DNA sequence data during a small DNA barcoding project in Indonesia.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.