Herbarium data: Global biodiversity and societal botanical needs for novel research

Abstract

Building on centuries of research based on herbarium specimens gathered through time and around the globe, a new era of discovery, synthesis, and prediction using digitized collections data has begun. This paper provides an overview of how aggregated, open access botanical and associated biological, environmental, and ecological data sets, from genes to the ecosystem, can be used to document the impacts of global change on communities, organisms, and society; predict future impacts; and help to drive the remediation of change. Advocacy for botanical collections and their expansion is needed, including ongoing digitization and online publishing. The addition of non‐traditional digitized data fields, user annotation capability, and born‐digital field data collection enables the rapid access of rich, digitally available data sets for research, education, informed decision‐making, and other scholarly and creative activities. Researchers are receiving enormous benefits from data aggregators including the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), but effective collaboration around data infrastructures is needed when working with large and disparate data sets. Tools for data discovery, visualization, analysis, and skills training are increasingly important for inspiring novel research that improves the intrinsic value of physical and digital botanical collections.

Patterns and biases in an Arctic herbarium specimen collection: Implications for phenological research

“…Our results for an Arctic herbarium specimen collection are consistent with other papers on temperate collections showing that herbarium specimens can be a substantial source of phenological data (Willis et al., ; James et al., ). More than 97% of the records in this study included a specific date of collection, indicating that herbarium specimens can be used to study plant phenology in the Arctic.…”

“…Herbarium specimens are increasingly used in phenology, the study of the timing of seasonal life history events such as flowering and fruiting (Lavoie, ; James et al., ). Herbarium specimens are often collected in flower or fruit and thus provide evidence of the species’ flowering or fruiting time at the specified collection location and year.…”

“…Specimens have been used to correlate phenological patterns with time, geography, climate, and species’ life history traits at various scales (Lavoie, ; Kharouba and Vellend, ; Panchen and Gorelick, ; Willis et al., ; Gallinat et al., ; Jones and Daehler, ). In particular, the long time series presented by herbarium collections allows the detection of the consequences of climate change (Lavoie, ; James et al., ; Jones and Daehler, ). However, most herbarium specimens were collected for taxonomical and biogeographical purposes, including regional, institutional, and professional contexts, without phenology in mind (Willis et al., ).…”

iNaturalist as a tool to expand the research value of museum specimens

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Natural history collections, especially herbarium specimens, are receiving unprecedented attention due to recently developed technologies (e.g., next-generation sequencing, niche modeling) that enable new areas of collections-based study and widespread digitization initiatives that increase their accessibility (Soltis, 2017;James et al, 2018). The diverse applications of herbarium data are rapidly evolving, especially unanticipated uses in the context of studying global change, with many specimen uses arising only recently (Heberling and Isaac, 2017).

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A born‐digital field‐to‐database solution for collections‐based research using collNotes and collBook

“…Proactively capturing data from these new specimens earlier in the process reduces the potential for transcription errors (Nelson et al., ) and avoids adding to the backlog of records in need of transcription. Attention to this issue has highlighted the need for born‐digital records, i.e., field data that are initially gathered in digital formats so that they are ready for upload to online data portals and label printing (Paul et al., ; James et al., ).…”