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The Importance of Herbaria
... There have been many articles that address the importance of collections (e.g. Funk 2003aFunk , 2003bFunk , 2006Holmes et al. 2016;Kemp 2015;SA2000 1994Wen 2015), and there are also many recent examples of the use of plant collections for a variety of topics including work on the 'origin of temperate forests' (Manos & Meireles 2015) and studies, based on specimen information, that document and predict climate change (Ellis et al. 2012;Johnson et al. 2011;Primack et al. 2004). Likewise collections have been used for studies on species loss and the increase and decrease in total species based on the timing of the introduction of invasive species (Ellis et al. 2012;Feeley 2012;Martin et al. 2014), and collections data have been combined with microsatellite data and habitat modelling to test competing hypotheses concerning historical distributions (Fant et al. 2014). ...
... Of course, an additional importance of collections is that they are mined for leaf material for DNA-based studies, and this is likely to increase as next generation sequencing increases the usability of fragmented DNA, for instance, Beck and Semple (2015) used Next-generation sampling pairing genomics with herbarium specimens to give a species-level signal in Solidago (Compositae) and 93 of the 95 herbarium specimens (5-45 years old) were sequenced successfully using an Illumina platform. These examples are few, but they show that biodiversity collections, and herbaria in particular, are not static repositories, instead they are windows into the past, present, and future and essential tools for research in biological sciences (Fig. 2;Funk 2003aFunk , 2003bJohnson 2015;Schilthuizen et al. 2015). ...
... One definition of a friend is "someone who accepts your past, supports your present, and encourages your future" and I think temperate and tropical botanists are now, and really have been for some time, friends. Afterward This paper is an outgrowth of my longstanding interest in the health and utility of biodiversity collections (especially herbaria) and their ancillary collections (Funk 2003a(Funk , 2003b(Funk , 2006(Funk , 2014. Mine is not the only voice on this topic, and the literature is littered with the efforts of many (see citations in the Introduction and use Google Scholar to find many additional ones) to stem the receding tide of funding that sucks away our ability to mount expeditions, conduct research, maintain collections, and train the next generation of systematists. ...
... There have been many articles that address the importance of collections (e.g. Funk 2003aFunk , 2003bFunk , 2006Holmes et al. 2016;Kemp 2015;SA2000 1994Wen 2015), and there are also many recent examples of the use of plant collections for a variety of topics including work on the 'origin of temperate forests' (Manos & Meireles 2015) and studies, based on specimen information, that document and predict climate change (Ellis et al. 2012;Johnson et al. 2011;Primack et al. 2004). Likewise collections have been used for studies on species loss and the increase and decrease in total species based on the timing of the introduction of invasive species (Ellis et al. 2012;Feeley 2012;Martin et al. 2014), and collections data have been combined with microsatellite data and habitat modelling to test competing hypotheses concerning historical distributions (Fant et al. 2014). ...
... Of course, an additional importance of collections is that they are mined for leaf material for DNA-based studies, and this is likely to increase as next generation sequencing increases the usability of fragmented DNA, for instance, Beck and Semple (2015) used Next-generation sampling pairing genomics with herbarium specimens to give a species-level signal in Solidago (Compositae) and 93 of the 95 herbarium specimens (5-45 years old) were sequenced successfully using an Illumina platform. These examples are few, but they show that biodiversity collections, and herbaria in particular, are not static repositories, instead they are windows into the past, present, and future and essential tools for research in biological sciences (Fig. 2;Funk 2003aFunk , 2003bJohnson 2015;Schilthuizen et al. 2015). ...
... One definition of a friend is "someone who accepts your past, supports your present, and encourages your future" and I think temperate and tropical botanists are now, and really have been for some time, friends. Afterward This paper is an outgrowth of my longstanding interest in the health and utility of biodiversity collections (especially herbaria) and their ancillary collections (Funk 2003a(Funk , 2003b(Funk , 2006(Funk , 2014. Mine is not the only voice on this topic, and the literature is littered with the efforts of many (see citations in the Introduction and use Google Scholar to find many additional ones) to stem the receding tide of funding that sucks away our ability to mount expeditions, conduct research, maintain collections, and train the next generation of systematists. ...
... Los herbarios son centros de investigación con información importante e irremplazable sobre las plantas y los ecosistemas donde habitan, catalogando especímenes de plantas, evidencia adicional (e.g., fotografías), datos asociados y material bibliográfico [1]. Los herbarios son una herramienta fundamental para documentar la diversidad, filogénia, ecología y biogeografía vegetal [2,3], son repositorios de información genética histórica, incrementan nuestro conocimiento sobre los usos de las plantas para beneficio de la sociedad humana, soportan decisiones de conservación y manejo de recursos vegetales [4,5], y son un importante recurso educativo para la enseñanza de las ciencias biológicas y ambientales [6]. ...
... Los herbarios son una herramienta fundamental para documentar la diversidad, filogénia, ecología y biogeografía vegetal [2,3], son repositorios de información genética histórica, incrementan nuestro conocimiento sobre los usos de las plantas para beneficio de la sociedad humana, soportan decisiones de conservación y manejo de recursos vegetales [4,5], y son un importante recurso educativo para la enseñanza de las ciencias biológicas y ambientales [6]. Funk [1] identificó decenas de usos que puede tener un herbario. Los especímenes guardados en herbarios no sólo constituyen material para catalogar, sino también son una fuente de material para ser investigado por taxónomos, anatomistas vegetales, citólogos y genetistas moleculares, y en especial, son la base de la reproducibilidad, uno de los principios esenciales del método científico, pues permiten que los especímenes que constituyen evidencia de los estudios sean examinados y los análisis repetidos de manera independiente [1,7]. ...
... Funk [1] identificó decenas de usos que puede tener un herbario. Los especímenes guardados en herbarios no sólo constituyen material para catalogar, sino también son una fuente de material para ser investigado por taxónomos, anatomistas vegetales, citólogos y genetistas moleculares, y en especial, son la base de la reproducibilidad, uno de los principios esenciales del método científico, pues permiten que los especímenes que constituyen evidencia de los estudios sean examinados y los análisis repetidos de manera independiente [1,7]. Hoy en día, la preservación y documentación de especímenes no se limita a la clásica técnica de herborizar material (material seco o muestras líquidas) y su posterior almacenamiento en gabinetes; sino también se utiliza sistemas de digitalización de especímenes a través de medios audiovisuales y el almacenamiento de los datos en bases de datos vinculadas. ...
El Herbario de Botánica Económica QUSF de la Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador), registrado en el Index Herbariorum desde el 2001, alberga más de veinte mil especímenes catalogados de 2131 especies de Magnoliophyta y Pteridophyta. Un tercio de estos especímenes tiene información sobre sus usos y aplicaciones de valor económico. Asteraceae y Solanaceae son las familias mejor representadas en la colección. Casi la mitad de los especímenes proviene de bosques nublados andinos altamente diversos. La colección tiene especímenes de 23 de las 24 provincias del Ecuador, siendo Pichincha la provincia mejor representada. Siete especímenes tipo de seis especies están depositados en el QUSF, incluyendo los holotipos de Larnax macasiana S. Deanna, Leiva & Barboza, y Tiputinia foetida PE. Berry & C. Woodw. En esta artículo presentamos una reseña histórica del herbario, analizamos la representatividad de la colección y describimos los planes futuros de desarrollo.
... Los herbarios se consideran sitios donde se deposita material vegetal seco que proveen información sobre las plantas (Katinas, 2001;Funk, 2003a). Los primeros herbarios eran libros de plantas medicinales y sus usos, basada en plantas silvestres o cultivadas (Sprague y Nelmes, 1931). ...
... Los primeros herbarios eran libros de plantas medicinales y sus usos, basada en plantas silvestres o cultivadas (Sprague y Nelmes, 1931). Los herbarios se han usado para estudios de sistemática, taxonomía, palinología, filogenia basada en datos morfológicos y moleculares, anatomía, fitogeografìa, ecofisiología, entre otros (Funk, 2003a;Funk, 2003b; ...
RESUMEN El Herbario Paul R. House tiene como finalidad albergar la flora útil de Honduras. Se realizo el registro y la actualización de nombres y familias y su vez, elaborar una base de datos en Access de plantas con importancia económica con basada en la colección del Herbario de Plantas Útiles de Honduras, Paul R. House. Este cuenta con 1547 especímenes depositados distribuidos en 144 familias pertenecientes a 447 géneros y 712 especies vegetales. Se registra un 80% de especies son nativas y el 20% introducidas. La mayoría de las especies registradas son medicinales (68%), comestibles (8%), representada por la familia Fabaceae, Malvaceae y Rubiaceae. Además, se enlistan los principales colectores y sitios de colecta. Esta información será el apoyo para estudios morfológicos, genéticos, florísticos, etnobotánicos, asimismo, para educación formal y técnica para estudiantes e investigadores. ABSTRACT The purpose of the Paul R. House Herbarium is to house the useful flora of Honduras. The register and updating of names and families was carried out and, likewise, a database in Access of plants with economic importance was created based on the collection of the Herbarium of Useful Plants of Honduras, Paul R. House. This has 1547 deposited specimens distributed in 144 families belonging to 447 genera and 712 plant species. 80% of species are native and 20% introduced. Most of the registered species are medicinal (68%), edible (8%), represented by the Fabaceae, Malvaceae and Rubiaceae families. In addition, the main collectors and collection sites are listed. This information will be the support for morphological, genetic, floristic, ethnobotanical studies, as well as for formal education and technical for students and researchers.
... Herbaria, like other natural history collections, are immense primary data repositories documenting biodiversity across space and time over the last 500 years (Stefanaki et al., 2019). Each specimen contains a wealth of information including geographic occurrence data, phenotype, genotype, phenological status, and biotic interactions (Funk, 2003;Heberling and Burke, 2019). Collectively herbarium specimens are analyzed for studies in taxonomy, systematics, floristics, ecology, phenology, conservation, and global environmental change (Funk, 2003;Calinger et al., 2013;Willis et al., 2017;Lang et al., 2019;Albani Rocchetti et al., 2021). ...
... Each specimen contains a wealth of information including geographic occurrence data, phenotype, genotype, phenological status, and biotic interactions (Funk, 2003;Heberling and Burke, 2019). Collectively herbarium specimens are analyzed for studies in taxonomy, systematics, floristics, ecology, phenology, conservation, and global environmental change (Funk, 2003;Calinger et al., 2013;Willis et al., 2017;Lang et al., 2019;Albani Rocchetti et al., 2021). ...
Herbarium sheets present a unique view of the world's botanical history, evolution, and biodiversity. This makes them an all–important data source for botanical research. With the increased digitization of herbaria worldwide and advances in the domain of fine–grained visual classification which can facilitate automatic identification of herbarium specimen images, there are many opportunities for supporting and expanding research in this field. However, existing datasets are either too small, or not diverse enough, in terms of represented taxa, geographic distribution, and imaging protocols. Furthermore, aggregating datasets is difficult as taxa are recognized under a multitude of names and must be aligned to a common reference. We introduce the Herbarium 2021 Half–Earth dataset: the largest and most diverse dataset of herbarium specimen images, to date, for automatic taxon recognition. We also present the results of the Herbarium 2021 Half–Earth challenge, a competition that was part of the Eighth Workshop on Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC8) and hosted by Kaggle to encourage the development of models to automatically identify taxa from herbarium sheet images.
... These collections, and their incorporated information, began to subsidize the development of activities in increasingly multidisciplinary areas, with six main points, summarized in 1985 by S. A. Mori and collaborators (1985). The unfolding and peculiarities of these functions, as well as the incorporation of additional characteristics, were later systematized for the Smithsonian Institute by V. Funk, who compiled a list of 32 activities supporting various scientific and academic interests, in order to demonstrate herbaria importance (Funk 2003). ...
... Thus, botanical knowledge added to herbaria collections has increasingly subsidized a number of different studies, as illustrated by approaches that include (i) indirectly prospecting regions potentially rich in specific minerals (inferred by soil which species displaying accumulation characteristics inhabit) (Brooks et al. 1977); (ii) recognizing and valuing the correct identification of species as important for forest management plans (Procópio & Secco 2008); (iii) clarifying taxonomic positions among species based on their potential to accumulate specific metals (Fernando et al. 2009); (iv) inferring hypotheses concerning evolutionary, ecological and conservation research using taxonomic control variables (Franz et al. 2016);(v) introducing new floristic analysis methods that reflect the conservation value of protected areas (Wieringa & Sosef 2011);(vi) relating floristic diversity to specific local fauna behaviors (Machado & Oliveira 2015); (vii) exploring herbaria collection potential in expanding phenological research (Willis et al. 2017); (viii) formulating evolutionary developmental biology hypotheses from morphometric studies (Chen et al. 2018); and (ix) establishing standards to relate taxonomic diversity to niche climatic conditions (Schneider et al. 2018), among others. ...
This study accessed the informational potential of herbaria collections as a tool for establishing an indication of the distribution of species that produce pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs), which are considered natural toxins, in Brazil. A total of 55,480 registered exsiccates were recorded, comprising species belonging to 17 genera, including Ipomoea (33.2%) (Convolvulaceae), Crotalaria (23.8%) (Fabaceae), Eupatorium (16.4%), Senecio (13.4%), Erechtites (3.97%) (Asteraceae) and Pleurothallis (8.28%) (Orchidaceae). These records were more densely distributed in the herbaria of the southeastern (30%), southern (28%) and northeastern (24%) Brazilian states. PAs are toxic to animals in general and display high potential for contamination of human food-production chains. A qualitative relationship was evidenced when carrying out a simultaneous compilation of cases of livestock intoxicated by the ingestion of these species, evidencing risks associated with PA-contaminated foodstuffs such as cereals, meats, milks and honey. The botanical census carried out herein is aimed at supporting a prospective study on the health risk presented by PA-producing species while bringing about indicators for their distribution in Brazil. This previously unpublished approach highlights the value of multidisciplinary information incorporated into herbaria botanical collections, with possible impacts on public health.
... Os herbários, como instituições que fazem a guarda das coleções botânicas, também costumam ser associados a outras coleções, além daquelas de exsicatas, tais como carpotecas, xilotecas, coleções em meio líquido, laminários, bibliotecas especializadas em literatura botânica, contemplando uma estrutura técnico-científica que dá suporte ao estudo das plantas, dos fungos e de sua diversidade. Os herbários proveem material comparativo que é essencial para estudos em taxonomia, sistemática, ecologia, anatomia, morfologia, biologia da conservação, etnobotânica, além de serem utilizados para o ensino e para outros usos pelo público em geral (FUNK, 2002). Considerando a importância de se conhecer um herbário, a maior parte das pessoas sequer ouviu falar. ...
... Os herbários possuem inúmeras utilizações. Funk (2002) listou 32 usos para um herbário (Quadro 1) e, dois anos mais tarde, completou a lista para 72 diferentes usos (FUNK, 2004), que compreendem desde a identificação de espécies, passando pela descoberta ou confirmação de espécies novas, provimento de dados para florística, ecologia, para acompanhamento de mudanças ambientais, estudos evolutivos, conhecimento dos usos populares das plantas, repositório de vouchers (testemunhos) para pesquisas, até a promoção de intercâmbio técnico e científico entre instituições. Quadro 1. Usos de um herbário, traduzido de Funk (2002). ...
... Os herbários, como instituições que fazem a guarda das coleções botânicas, também costumam ser associados a outras coleções, além daquelas de exsicatas, tais como carpotecas, xilotecas, coleções em meio líquido, laminários, bibliotecas especializadas em literatura botânica, contemplando uma estrutura técnico-científica que dá suporte ao estudo das plantas, dos fungos e de sua diversidade. Os herbários proveem material comparativo que é essencial para estudos em taxonomia, sistemática, ecologia, anatomia, morfologia, biologia da conservação, etnobotânica, além de serem utilizados para o ensino e para outros usos pelo público em geral (FUNK, 2002). Considerando a importância de se conhecer um herbário, a maior parte das pessoas sequer ouviu falar. ...
... Os herbários possuem inúmeras utilizações. Funk (2002) listou 32 usos para um herbário (Quadro 1) e, dois anos mais tarde, completou a lista para 72 diferentes usos (FUNK, 2004), que compreendem desde a identificação de espécies, passando pela descoberta ou confirmação de espécies novas, provimento de dados para florística, ecologia, para acompanhamento de mudanças ambientais, estudos evolutivos, conhecimento dos usos populares das plantas, repositório de vouchers (testemunhos) para pesquisas, até a promoção de intercâmbio técnico e científico entre instituições. Quadro 1. Usos de um herbário, traduzido de Funk (2002). ...
As alterações globais de origem antrópica e as consequentes mudanças climáticas estão entre os principais desafios para a humanidade nas próximas décadas. Essas alterações já estão afetando tanto os ecossistemas naturais, quanto os ecossistemas manejados, visto que as plantas são intimamente dependentes das condições edafoclimáticas para seu crescimento e sobrevivência. Nesse capítulo, compilamos as principais respostas de plantas nativas e cultivadas de experimentos realizados no Brasil sob condições previstas de temperatura, disponibilidade de água e concentração atmosférica de CO2 no futuro próximo. Ao final do capítulo, identificamos as principais lacunas ainda existentes no
cenário brasileiro e sugerimos algumas orientações para futuras pesquisas
... Os herbários, como instituições que fazem a guarda das coleções botânicas, também costumam ser associados a outras coleções, além daquelas de exsicatas, tais como carpotecas, xilotecas, coleções em meio líquido, laminários, bibliotecas especializadas em literatura botânica, contemplando uma estrutura técnico-científica que dá suporte ao estudo das plantas, dos fungos e de sua diversidade. Os herbários proveem material comparativo que é essencial para estudos em taxonomia, sistemática, ecologia, anatomia, morfologia, biologia da conservação, etnobotânica, além de serem utilizados para o ensino e para outros usos pelo público em geral (FUNK, 2002). Considerando a importância de se conhecer um herbário, a maior parte das pessoas sequer ouviu falar. ...
... Os herbários possuem inúmeras utilizações. Funk (2002) listou 32 usos para um herbário (Quadro 1) e, dois anos mais tarde, completou a lista para 72 diferentes usos (FUNK, 2004), que compreendem desde a identificação de espécies, passando pela descoberta ou confirmação de espécies novas, provimento de dados para florística, ecologia, para acompanhamento de mudanças ambientais, estudos evolutivos, conhecimento dos usos populares das plantas, repositório de vouchers (testemunhos) para pesquisas, até a promoção de intercâmbio técnico e científico entre instituições. Quadro 1. Usos de um herbário, traduzido de Funk (2002). ...
Public squares serve as an escape for people who want a little bit of nature in their daily lives, as it is an environment that provides natural elements to citizens, bringing harmony and well-being, being a leisure area, having importance in ecological aspects, social, political and contributing to the preservation of flora. It aimed to carry out a survey of plant species in public squares in Humaitá-AM. Five neighborhoods with five squares were visited, with a square in each neighborhood that they are; Praça da Matriz, Praça da Saúde, Praça da Rodoviária, Praça Santo Antônio and Praça da Olaria. The identification of the species was carried out by means of a field survey and confirmed with the aid of botanical identifiers and scientific literature. The most found species were from the Arecaceae family; areca bamboo with seventeen specimens (Dypsis lutescens (H. Wendl.) Beentje & J.) and blue palm tree with seventeen specimens (Bismarckia nobilis Hildebr. & H.Wendl.); from the Moraceae family, fig-benjamim ith forty-eight specimens (Ficus benjamina L.); from the family Myrtaceae, red jambo with forty specimens (Syzygium malaccense (L.) Merr. & L.M. Perry); of the Chrysobalanaceae family; oiti with fifteen specimens (Licania tomentosa (Benth.) Fritsch.); from the Rubiaceae family, ixora compact with eleven specimens (Ixora coccinea L.) and Anacardiaceae family, mango with 13 specimens (Mangifera indica L.). So the squares are important for leisure and well-being, as it serves for people to realize that nature is part of human life and it is essential to live in balance with it.
... It was started from knowledge exchange through ethnic groups by oral tradition and then in the documented form. Herbaria conserving identified and authenticated plants for future correspondence play an important role in this regard and it declared different auxiliary aspects of herbaria for phytomedicinal research (Funk, 2003;Neisbitt, 2014;Ahmed and Hasan, 2016). Also the vouchers are crucial in authenticating the taxonomy of an organism, as a tool for identifying localities of the taxon, and for additional taxonomic, genetic, ecological, and/or environmental research (Eisenman et al., 2012). ...
... Voucher specimens provide a permanent, physical record and form the foundation on which all natural product research stands (Funk, 2003;Culley, 2013). The annotations and recommendations in this regard are noteworthy (Perkins, 2016). ...
A herbarium is a storehouse of plant specimens which are collected, dried and mounted on handmade paper sheets. They will be arranged in plant families recognized system of classification and kept in pigeon holes of steel or wooden cup boards and maintained carefully for current and future studies. It is a reference material for naming, identification and classification of the plants. The herbaria are indexed with unique codes in the “Index Herbariorum” presently assigned and maintained by New York Botanical Garden herbarium. Also the non-vascular plant specimens (algae, certain fungi, lichens, bryophytes and certain pteridophyptes) can be fixed in FAA fixative and bring to the herbarium for identification and voucher specimen number. The article also informed the merits of the “Plant Specimen Preparation Kit” from Nihon Vogue-Sha, Japan for use of specimens’ preparation both vascular and non-vascular plants where there is no involvement of chemicals and harsh environmental conditions. Since the identification and voucher specimen number is essential in these days for research as well as for publications, here we are presenting useful information.
... It was started from knowledge exchange through ethnic groups by oral tradition and then in the documented form. Herbaria conserving identified and authenticated plants for future correspondence play an important role in this regard and it declared different auxiliary aspects of herbaria for phytomedicinal research (Funk, 2003; Neisbitt, 2014; Ahmed and Hasan, 2016). Also the vouchers are crucial in authenticating the taxonomy of an organism, as a tool for identifying localities of the taxon, and for additional taxonomic, genetic, ecological, and/or environmental research (Eisenman et al., 2012). ...
... Voucher specimens provide a permanent, physical record and form the foundation on which all natural product research stands (Funk, 2003; Culley, 2013). The annotations and recommendations in this regard are noteworthy (Perkins, 2016). ...
A herbarium is a storehouse of plant specimens which are collected, dried and mounted on handmade paper sheets. They will be arranged in plant families recognized system of classification and kept in pigeon holes of steel or wooden cup boards and maintained carefully for current and future studies. It is a reference material for naming, identification and classification of the plants. The herbaria are indexed with unique codes in the “Index Herbariorum” presently assigned and maintained by New York Botanical Garden herbarium. Also the non-vascular plant specimens (algae, certain fungi, lichens, bryophytes and certain pteridophyptes) can be fixed in FAA fixative and bring to the herbarium for identification and voucher specimen number. The article also informed the merits of the “Plant Specimen Preparation Kit” from Nihon Vogue-Sha, Japan for use of specimens’ preparation both vascular and non-vascular plants where there is no involvement of chemicals and harsh environmental conditions. Since the identification and voucher specimen number is essential in these days for research as well as for publications, here we are presenting useful information.
... Herbaria serve as an important source of primary data for many studies, including taxonomic, biogeographic and phylogenetic ones (Holmes et al. 2016, Soltis 2017, James et al. 2018, Ball-Damerow et al. 2019. The herbarium management is a responsible task during which the curators face several issues, including organisation of permanent access, long-term preservation of the collection, unintentional damage to specimens and, occasionally, vandalism (Funk 2002, Pennock 2017, Rabeler et al. 2019. Moreover, processing of the natural history collections, including the herbarium collections, by researchers in person is laborious and expensive (Suarez and Tsutsui 2004, Bradley et al. 2014, Popov et al. 2021. ...
Digitisation of hosted specimens is a crucial task for all herbaria worldwide and is one of the main streams for today. By digitising their collections and publishing the datasets, the herbaria grant access to essential data to a wide research audience and, as a result, involve their collections in scientific work more actively. Digitisation also allows virtual preservation of the collections, which is especially important in conditions of hostilities, when the entire collection can be destroyed or damaged in one moment. This paper describes two datasets recently published in GBIF in the framework of the LWS herbarium digitisation initiative. It also contains some considerations about further digitisation priorities and plans in the LWS Herbarium in the context of complicated war conditions and limited facilities.
In total, 2,419 occurrence records from Ukraine mobilised from LWS Herbarium were published. These datasets are planned to be dynamic with the addition of new records along with progress of digitisation work at LWS. At least 6,000 more records are planned to be published through these datasets in 2024.
... Herbaria serve as an important source of primary data for many studies, including taxonomic, biogeographic, and phylogenetic ones (Holmes et al. 2016, Soltis 2017, James et al. 2018, Ball-Damerow et al. 2019. The herbarium management is a responsible task during which the curators face several issues, including organization of permanent access, long-term preservation of the collection, unintentional damage to specimens and, occasionally, vandalism (Funk 2002, Pennock 2017, Rabeler et al. 2019. Moreover, processing of the natural history collections, including the herbarium collections, by researchers in person is laborious and expensive (Suarez and Tsutsui 2004, Bradley et al. 2014, Popov et al. 2021. ...
Digitization of hosted specimens is a crucial task for all herbaria worldwide and is one of the main streams for today. By digitizing their collections and publishing the datasets, the herbaria grant access to essential data to a wide research audience and, as a result, involve their collections in scientific work more actively. Digitization also allows virtual preservation of the collections, which is especially important in conditions of hostilities, when the entire collection can be destroyed or damaged in one moment. This paper describes two datasets recently published in GBIF in frames of the LWS herbarium digitization initiative. It also contains some considerations about further digitization priorities and plans in the LWS herbarium in the context of complicated war conditions and limited facilities.
In total, 2,419 occurrence records from Ukraine mobilized from LWS herbarium were published. These datasets are planned to be dynamic with the addition of new records along with progress of digitization work at LWS. At least 6,000 more records are planned to be published through these datasets in 2024.
... Thanks to the digitisation of herbarium collections, images of sheets with plant specimens are available on websites of many herbaria, making them available to a wide audience. Herbaria provide material samples for biological research in diverse fields (Funk 2003), including global change biology (Meineke et al. 2018;Lang et al. 2019), and are an important source of species discovery (Bebber et al. 2010). They play an integral role in a modern additive research process (Henning et al. 2018) that aims to describe and understand the evolution and diversity of organisms worldwide (Harris and Marsico 2017;Borsch et al. 2020). ...
Józef Warszewicz (1812–1864) was one of the first Polish naturalists to explore the flora of the tropical New World. During two expeditions to Central and South America (1844–1850 and 1850–1853) he collected and delivered to Europe up to twenty thousand plant specimens. To honour his service and his achievements in plant collections, different taxonomists described more than 100 taxa using the surname Warszewicz, for example in the genus name ( Warszewiczia ) and the species epithets ( warszewiczii , warscewiczii , warszewicziana ). Unfortunately, a large part of Warszewicz’s collection of plant species deposited in the Berlin Herbarium (B), including many type specimens was destroyed during World War II. During digitisation of herbarium collections preserved in the Herbarium of the Jagiellonian University (KRA), we reviewed more than 650 herbarium sheets with plant specimens collected by Warszewicz and originating from his trips to Central and South America. In this paper, we present the typification of five names of species, described base on Warszewicz’s plant material. We select lectotypes for Berberis warszewiczii , Esenbeckia warscewiczii , Psammisia ramiflora , Remijia involucrata and Rondeletia orthoneura , and provide data on the presence of 17 specimens (isotypes) representing Esenbeckia cornuta , an extremely rare species, that to date is known only from the type locality in Peru. A list of all Warszewicz’s specimens preserved at KRA herbarium is also presented. Additionally, in the result of the revision of syntypes of Berberis multiflora and Rondeletia reflexa we designated here the lectotypes for these taxa.
... museums and herbaria) are essential for studying biodiversity (Graham et al., 2004). Taxonomists use these collections to describe new species, produce taxonomic revisions and species checklists, among other important uses (Bebber et al., 2010;Besnard et al., 2018;Funk, 2003). In macroecology, biogeography and conservation, biological collections are often the main source of species records, which are used to study spatial patterns of biodiversity, species ecological niches, endemism levels and conservation status (Dauby et al., 2017;Graham et al., 2004;Lima et al., 2020;Ulloa et al., 2017). ...
Species records from biological collections are becoming increasingly available online. This unprecedented availability of records has largely supported recent studies in taxonomy, biogeography, macroecology and biodiversity conservation. Biological collections vary in their documentation and notation standards, which have changed through time. For different reasons, neither collections nor data repositories perform the editing, formatting and standardisation of the data, leaving these tasks to the final users of the species records (e.g. taxonomists, ecologists and conservationists). These tasks are challenging, particularly when working with millions of records from hundreds of biological collections.
To help collection curators and final users perform those tasks, we introduce plantR, an open‐source package that provides a comprehensive toolbox to manage species records from biological collections. The package is accompanied by the proposal of a reproducible workflow to manage this type of data in taxonomy, ecology and biodiversity conservation. It is implemented in R and designed to handle relatively large datasets as fast as possible. Initially designed to handle plant species records, many of the plantR features also apply to other groups of organisms, given that the data structure is similar.
The plantR workflow includes tools to (a) download records from different data repositories, (b) standardise typical fields associated with species records, (c) validate the locality, geographical coordinates, taxonomic nomenclature and species identifications, including the retrieval of duplicates across collections, and (d) summarise and export records, including the construction of species lists with vouchers.
Other R packages provide tools to tackle some of the workflow steps described above. But in addition to the new tools and resources related to data standardisation and validation, the greatest strength of plantR is to provide a comprehensive and user‐friendly workflow in one single environment, performing all tasks from data retrieval to export. Thus, plantR can help researchers better assess data quality and avoid data leakage in a wide variety of studies using species records.
... Herbarium specimens have been collected from all over the world for hundreds of years and serve as a rich source of crucial data for studying plant biodiversity and ecology [12]. Expanding access to specimen types across digitization is essential in maintaining specimens and making relevant knowledge readily available to researchers and the public. ...
Pattern Recognition Letters
Available online 21 July 2021
In Press, Journal Pre-proofWhat are Journal Pre-proof articles?
Deep Leaf: Mask R-CNN based leaf Detection and Segmentation from digitized herbarium specimen images
Author links open overlay panelAbdelazizTrikiaWalidMahdia
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2021.07.003
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Highlights
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A modified mask RCNN named Deep Leaf is developed to identify the leaves from the digitized herbarium specimens.
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Deep Leaf measures automatically the morphological traits of the extracted leaves.
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Deep features are extracted through an improved ResNet50/101, which is chosen as the backbone network of the feature extraction.
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We achieved better performance compared with the original mask RCNN algorithm for leaves detection.
Abstract
The generation of morphological traits of plants such as the leaf length, width, perimeter, area, and petiole length are fundamental features of herbarium specimens, thus providing high-quality data to investigate plant responses to ongoing climatic change and plant history evolution. However, the existing measurement methods are primarily associated with manual analysis, which is labor-intensive and inefficient. This paper proposes a deep learning-based approach, called Deep Leaf, for detecting and pixel-wise segmentation of leaves based on the improved state-of-the-art instance segmentation approach, Mask Region Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN). Deep Leaf can accurately detect each leaf in the herbarium specimen and measure the associated morphological traits. The experimental results indicate that our automated approach can segment the leaves of different families. Compared to manual measurement done by ecologist and botanist experts, the average relative error of leaf length is 4.6%, while the average relative error of leaf width is 5.7%.
... They are also useful for examining historical distribution and abundance of species, providing insight into actual and potential effects of anthropogenic environmental change (Araujo and Rahbek 2006;Feeley and Silman 2011). The benefits of museum and herbaria collections are many, ranging from niche modeling to food safety to medicine (Funk 2003;Funk 2018). As amateur scientists collect data they provide invaluable resources for professionals to further analyze, and some of the amateur scientists become experts or professionals themselves. ...
Citizen science, which has contributed greatly to scientific understanding, works through partnerships between non-governmental and governmental organizations, academia, and most importantly, volunteers. In the United States, Master Naturalist training programs prepare adults as knowledgeable environmental stewards. Once certified, Master Naturalists are encouraged to log annual volunteer activity hours involving scientific research and education. Compared to untrained volunteers, individuals who have completed Master Naturalist training (or similar programs) exhibit greater project involvement and efficiency at collecting data. These traits align well with the goals of citizen science and point to a symbiotic relationship between citizen science and Master Naturalist programs. Here, we convey how Master Naturalist programs benefit citizen science and provide guidelines for individuals who wish to pursue citizen science projects or programming to produce high quality citizen scientists.
... Atualmente, existem 4.217 herbários no mundo, dos quais 272 estão localizados no Brasil, mas apenas 37 sediados na Amazônia brasileira (SBB 2020;Thiers 2020). Um herbário resguarda espécimes de plantas, fungos e algas, possibilitando diversas aplicações didáticas e científicas, principalmente relacionadas com estudos em taxonomia, sistemática, ecologia, anatomia, morfologia, etnobotânica, paleobiologia e biologia da conservação (Funk 2003;Peixoto & Maia 2013;Heberling & Burke 2019). A disponibilização pública de dados e imagens de espécimes em escala global vem sendo realizada e é essencial para o reconhecimento de endemismos, para a adoção de medidas conservacionistas ou à detecção de áreas que necessitam de expedições adicionais de coleta (Funk 2018;Barberena et al. 2019;Rabeler et al. 2019). ...
Resumo: O herbário da Universidade Federal Rural da Amazônia-campus Capitão Poço (HCP), localizado no nordeste do estado do Pará, abriga 19 gêneros, 26 espécies e 49 espécimes de Orchidaceae, que correspondem a 7,4% do acervo. Os principais coletores são integrantes do grupo de pesquisa "Núcleo de Pesquisas em Epífitas". Notylia lyrata e Catasetum macrocarpum são as espécies mais bem documentadas, com sete e cinco espécimes, respectivamente. A consolidação desse novo herbário possibilitará o apoio aos projetos florístico-taxonômicos e ecológicos em desenvolvimento na mesorregião do nordeste paraense, que tendem a suprir as lacunas de coletas botânicas, tornando o HCP uma fonte regional de conhecimento da flora amazônica. Abstract: The herbarium of the Universidade Federal Rural da Amazônia-campus Capitão Poço (HCP), located in the northeast of the state of Pará, houses 19 genera, 26 species and 49 specimens of Orchidaceae, which correspond to 7.4% of the collection. The main collectors are members of the research group "Núcleo de Pesquisas em Epífitas". Notylia lyrata and Catasetum macrocarpum are the best documented species, with seven and five specimens, respectively. The consolidation of this new herbarium will make it possible to support the floristic-taxonomic and ecological projects under development in the northeastern region of Pará, which tends to fill the gaps of the botanical collection, thus making HCP a regional source for knowledge of Amazonian flora.
... Herbarium collections contain invaluable information about the evolutionary history of living and extinct species, and therefore represent a key source of knowledge for science (Funk, 2003;Raedig et al., 2010). Notwithstanding this, on the one hand, by the year 2000 the majority of data on Neotropical plants from herbarium collections were yet to be digitized (Morawetz and Raedig, 2007). ...
Brazil has high levels of biodiversity and has received strong criticism for the increasing country-wide deforestation that threatens it. Although a significant percentage of land area in Brazil is protected, the areas are insufficient and unevenly distributed. Many studies have contributed to the biogeographical knowledge of Brazilian flora, but no endemicity analysis (EA) has been conducted including all endemic angiosperms. We investigated the spatial component, drawing on a huge and taxonomically diverse dataset based on 827 016 records collected over the last two centuries. We conducted an EA for 15 034 species from 173 families using an optimality criterion with 2° and 3° grid sizes, in order to search for distributional concordance, to identify the biogeographical units and discuss the implications for conservation. Six analyses were run for basal angiosperms,
monocots and eudicots. The EA recovered 66 consensus areas (CAs). The concordance of CAs enabled the identification of five best-supported areas of endemism––three in the Atlantic and Parana Forest and two areas in the Cerrado province––supported
by species of 120 families. The age of divergence for some genera that contributed significantly to the identification of areas
recovered in the Cerrado coincides with the recent, <10 Ma, estimated age of that province. By contrast, the areas in the Atlantic and Parana Forest are supported by genera with earlier diversification >30 Ma, supporting an ancient origin. Most areas in
the Atlantic Forest are partially superimposed with the limits of the protected areas, however, big gaps were identified in the Cerrado. Protecting Brazilian biomes was at the heart of Brazil’s environmental policy. Regrettably, this scenario has radically
changed based on misleading divergences in conservation policy. Areas of endemism are pivotal for biodiversity conservation due to the common evolutionary history shared by their endemic taxa. Thus, we hope that these congruent patterns of endemism
support the establishment of biodiversity priorities.
... Herbaria contain a wealth of information about the ecological and evolutionary history of living and extinct species (Funk, 2003). Despite the continuous decline in plant collecting and declining support for herbaria (Dalton, 2003;Prather et al., 2004a,b), there has been a recent surge of studies leveraging herbarium collections for diverse research projects not focused on systematics (Pyke & Ehrlich, 2010;Lees et al., 2011;Feeley, 2012;Lavoie, 2013;Hart et al., 2014). ...
Non-random collecting practices may bias conclusions drawn from analyses of herbarium records. Recent efforts to fully digitize and mobilize regional floras offer a timely opportunity to assess commonalities and differences in herbarium sampling biases.
We determined spatial, temporal, trait, phylogenetic, and collector biases in ∼5 million herbarium records, representing three of the most complete digitized floras of the world: Australia (AU), South Africa (SA), and New England (NE).
We identified numerous shared and unique biases among these regions. Shared biases included specimens i) collected close to roads and herbaria; ii) collected more frequently during spring; iii) of threatened species collected less frequently; and iv) of close relatives collected in similar numbers. Regional differences included i) over-representation of graminoids in SA and AU and of annuals in AU; and ii) peak collection during the 1910s in NE, 1980s in SA, and 1990s in AU. Finally, in all regions, a disproportionately large percentage of specimens were collected by a few individuals. These mega-collectors, and their associated preferences and idiosyncrasies, may have shaped patterns of collection bias via ‘founder effects’.
Studies using herbarium collections should account for sampling biases and future collecting efforts should avoid compounding these biases.
... An allied contribution to society derives from organizing information about organisms that have already been collected and that reside in natural history collections (Funk, 2003(Funk, , 2014Kress & Funk, 2005; S. Knapp, 2015;Wen & al., 2015;Soltis, 2017). The digital revolution has made it much easier to capture data from collection labels as well as imaging of entire specimens, and interest in this effort is increasing (Rogers, 2016;Pennisi, 2019a). ...
Systematic biology is fundamental for providing organized information about the living world. It clarifies what organisms share our planet, and it also reveals the basic short‐term and long‐term processes that have given rise to this diversity. Human society is rapidly modernizing, largely through increased digital communications tied closely to satellite innovations. Communication is now global and instantaneous, allied with an awareness of place made possible by global positioning technology. Despite many positive recent developments, numerous tensions remain that threaten a tranquil world order and negatively impact biodiversity, such as between developed and developing countries, democratic and authoritarian governments, and among religious groups. The increasing human population is also bringing pressures to bear on global biodiversity through activities that result in air and water pollution, topsoil erosion, deforestation, ozone depletion, global warming, and taxic loss. The systematic biology community has been unable to respond effectively to these many new challenges due to fragmentation and lack of cohesion. Systematists have tended to focus more on issues relevant to their own taxonomic groups (e.g., bacteria, ferns, fungi, reptiles, mammals, etc.) and much less on global concerns. Systematists must become better organized to allow the global priority of inventorying the planet to be achieved as soon as practicable. A global organization, an International Federation for Systematic Biology, should be formed to serve as a coordinator to help articulate five‐year and longer plans. Large‐scale funding (billions of dollars) must be sought to allow implementation of shared goals. Projects must be created that more obviously connect in some fashion to major societal problems such as poverty, water resources, food production, and human health. The astronomy and nuclear physics communities provide models of successful planning and implementation, the former on understanding the extreme distant reality of our existence, and the latter on the extremely small atomic dimensions. Systematic biology focuses largely on understanding the middle range of reality that we can see and more easily directly experience. Making the case for understanding at this level should, in principle, be the easiest of all. Fundamental is that projects be simple in concept, visionary in perspective, and offering economic stimulus for participants (i.e., the creation of new jobs).
... The millions of plant specimens stored in herbaria around the world serve as priceless historical records of global biodiversity (Funk, 2003). The careful study and use of these specimens have been crucial in answering an assortment of evolutionary and ecological questions (Pyke and Ehrlich, 2010;Lavoie, 2013), such as the resolution of taxonomic puzzles and phylogenetic relationships (Ames and Spooner, 2008;Ng and Smith, 2016;Ng et al., 2019), phenological and species distribution responses to climate change (reviewed in Willis et al., 2017;Jones and Daehler, 2018;Lang et al., 2019), and plant-insect interactions through time (Lees et al., 2011;Meineke and Davies, 2018). ...
PREMISE: Obtaining phenotypic data from herbarium specimens can provide important insights into plant evolution and ecology but requires significant manual effort and time. Here, we present LeafMachine, an application designed to autonomously measure leaves from digitized herbarium specimens or leaf images using an ensemble of machine learning algorithms.
METHODS AND RESULTS: We trained LeafMachine on 2685 randomly sampled specimens from 138 herbaria and evaluated its performance on specimens spanning 20 diverse families and varying widely in resolution, quality, and layout. LeafMachine successfully extracted at least one leaf measurement from 82.0% and 60.8% of high- and low-resolution images, respectively. Of the unmeasured specimens, only 0.9% and 2.1% of high- and low-resolution images, respectively, were visually judged to have measurable leaves.
CONCLUSIONS: This flexible autonomous tool has the potential to vastly increase available trait information from herbarium specimens, and inform a multitude of evolutionary and ecological studies.
KEY WORDS: computer vision; herbarium digitization; LeafMachine; leaf morphology; machine learning.
... На жаль, інтенсивність збору та поповнення ботанічних колекцій по всьому світу зазнає кризи (Funk, 2003;2004;Suarez, Tsutsui, 2004). Тому, за останні десятиліття з'явилося багато нових підходів щодо сучасних можливостей використання гербаріїв, які часто виходять за межі ботаніки як науки (Pyke, Ehlrich, 2010;Lister et al., 2011;Lavoie, 2013 Зараз гербарій Закарпатського угорського інституту нараховує близько 4500 змонтованих гербарних аркушів, що представляють понад 900 видів судинних рослин. ...
Herbarium of the Ferenc Rákóczi II Transcarpathian Hungarian Institute.
— Information about Herbarium of the Ferenc Rákóczi II Transcarpathian
Hungarian Institute is presented. The collection is consists by 4.500 herbarium specimens, belonging to more than 900 species, about to represent the flora of the Transcarpathia. In the collection, the genus follows the system of Dalla Torre et Harms,
and within the genus the species follow each other in alphabetical order.
... Fresh forage-plants samples were collected from 20 areas and included cattle-feed grasses (fodder) from various farms. Samples are preserved in a herbarium for identification purposes [23]. At each sampling point, three types of forage plant were collected: Imperata cylindrica, Megathyrsus maximus, and Manihot utilissima, representing the main feedstocks for cattle in the study area. ...
Mercury (Hg) contamination in soil and forage plants is toxic to ecosystems, and artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is the main source of such pollution in the Bombana area of Indonesia. Hg contamination in soil and forage plants was investigated by particle-induced X-ray emission analysis of samples collected from three savannah areas (i.e., ASGM, commercial mining, and control areas) in the Bombana area. Hg contents of forage plants in the ASGM area (mean 9.90 ± 14 µg/g) exceeded those in the control area (2.70 ± 14 µg/g). Soil Hg contents (mean 390 ± 860 µg/g) were also higher than those in the control area (mean 7.40 ± 9.90 µg/g), with levels exceeding international regulatory limits. The Hg contents of 69% of soil and 78% of forage-plant samples exceeded critical toxicological limits. Thus, the Hg levels observed in this study indicate that contamination extending over large areas may cause major environmental problems.
... In this context it is important to consider that scientific approaches of elucidating the ancestral relationships of organisms and delimiting species and taxonomic groups -the field of biological systematics -has been revolutionized by the advent of (mainly molecular) phylogenetics as an evolutionary method and by electronic tools that will enable an integrative taxonomy. In addition to past and present distribution records of species, herbaria provide material samples for biological research in diverse fields (Funk 2003), including global change biology ( Meineke et al. 2018, Lang et al. 2019), and are a major source of species discovery ( Bebber et al. 2010). Comprehensive and free access to the information in herbaria as unique archives of biological information is thus a core task in building a research infrastructure that makes full use of the existing collection resources. ...
Plants, fungi and algae are important components of global biodiversity and are fundamental to all ecosystems. They are the basis for human well-being, providing food, materials and medicines. Specimens of all three groups of organisms are accommodated in herbaria, where they are commonly referred to as botanical specimens.
The large number of specimens in herbaria provides an ample, permanent and continuously improving knowledge base on these organisms and an indispensable source for the analysis of the distribution of species in space and time critical for current and future research relating to global biodiversity. In order to make full use of this resource, a research infrastructure has to be built that grants comprehensive and free access to the information in herbaria and botanical collections in general. This can be achieved through digitization of the botanical objects and associated data.
The botanical research community can count on a long-standing tradition of collaboration among institutions and individuals. It agreed on data standards and standard services even before the advent of computerization and information networking, an example being the Index Herbariorum as a global registry of herbaria helping towards the unique identification of specimens cited in the literature.
In the spirit of this collaborative history, 51 representatives from 30 institutions advocate to start the digitization of botanical collections with the overall wall-to-wall digitization of the flat objects stored in German herbaria. Germany has 70 herbaria holding almost 23 million specimens according to a national survey carried out in 2019. 87% of these specimens are not yet digitized. Experiences from other countries like France, the Netherlands, Finland, the US and Australia show that herbaria can be comprehensively and cost-efficiently digitized in a relatively short time due to established workflows and protocols for the high-throughput digitization of flat objects.
Most of the herbaria are part of a university (34), fewer belong to municipal museums (10) or state museums (8), six herbaria belong to institutions also supported by federal funds such as Leibniz institutes, and four belong to non-governmental organizations. A common data infrastructure must therefore integrate different kinds of institutions.
Making full use of the data gained by digitization requires the set-up of a digital infrastructure for storage, archiving, content indexing and networking as well as standardized access for the scientific use of digital objects. A standards-based portfolio of technical components has already been developed and successfully tested by the Biodiversity Informatics Community over the last two decades, comprising among others access protocols, collection databases, portals, tools for semantic enrichment and annotation, international networking, storage and archiving in accordance with international standards. This was achieved through the funding by national and international programs and initiatives, which also paved the road for the German contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
Herbaria constitute a large part of the German botanical collections that also comprise living collections in botanical gardens and seed banks, DNA- and tissue samples, specimens preserved in fluids or on microscope slides and more. Once the herbaria are digitized, these resources can be integrated, adding to the value of the overall research infrastructure. The community has agreed on tasks that are shared between the herbaria, as the German GBIF model already successfully demonstrates.
We have compiled nine scientific use cases of immediate societal relevance for an integrated infrastructure of botanical collections. They address accelerated biodiversity discovery and research, biomonitoring and conservation planning, biodiversity modelling, the generation of trait information, automated image recognition by artificial intelligence, automated pathogen detection, contextualization by interlinking objects, enabling provenance research, as well as education, outreach and citizen science.
We propose to start this initiative now in order to valorize German botanical collections as a vital part of a worldwide biodiversity data pool.
... Тож відповідаючи на запити часу, не останнім завданням для неї сьогодні є популяризація власних результатів досліджень. Поширеним способом досягнення цієї мети є виставкова діяльність у межах стаціонарних та тимчасових експозицій (Funk, 2002;Flannery, 2018). Підпорядковані музеям гербарні зібрання часто залучаються до експонування, що не скажеш про класичні наукові колекції. ...
The ways of using scientific herbarium materials in exhibition activity in Ukraine are discussed. Scientific funds of the Ukrainian Herbaria have never been used for exhibitions, and have only been known to a small number of scientists. Since 2017, five scientific Herbaria of Ukraine (CWU, KW, KWHU, LW, MSUD) have participated in some thematic exhibitions. Herbarium materials were presented as appropriately decorated specimens or as digitized copies.
... Furthermore, herbarium collections provide comparative material that is essential for studies in innumerable areas (e.g. taxonomy, systematics, ecology, conservation biology) and are used for teaching and by the public (Funk 2003). It is essential that government and research institutions work together to stress the importance of herbaria and to preserve collections for the future. ...
With approximately 100 species, Psidium Linnaeus (1753: 470) is one of the largest genera of the family Myrtaceae. The genus has a Neotropical distribution (Landrum & Kawasaki 1997, WCSP 2018), with Brazil being regarded as its center of diversity and endemism in eastern South America with 60 documented species (Flora do Brasil 2020 under construction, 2018).
... Herbaria are irreplaceable resources; the long-term capital investment in specimen acquisition and curation that they represent is increasingly rewarded across many fields (Funk 2003). Our study, by explicitly quantifying ethnobotanical data from herbaria and literature, demonstrates that herbaria contain valuable information that can both supplement and complement literature reports. ...
The use of herbarium specimens as vouchers to support ethnobotanical surveys is well established. However, herbaria may be underutilized resources for ethnobotanical research that depends on the analysis of large datasets compiled across multiple sites. Here, we compare two medicinal use datasets, one sourced from published papers and the other from online herbaria to determine whether herbarium and published data are comparable and to what extent herbarium specimens add new data and fill gaps in our knowledge of geographical extent of plant use. Using Brazilian legumes as a case study, we compiled 1400 use reports from 105 publications and 15 Brazilian herbaria. Of the 319 species in 107 genera with cited medicinal uses, 165 (51%) were recorded only in the literature and 55 (17%) only on herbarium labels. Mode of application, plant part used, or therapeutic use was less often documented by herbarium specimen labels (17% with information) than publications (70%). However, medicinal use of 21 of the 128 species known from only one report in the literature was substantiated from independently collected herbarium specimens, and 58 new therapeutic applications, 25 new plant parts, and 16 new modes of application were added for species known from the literature. Thus, when literature reports are few or information-poor, herbarium data can both validate and augment these reports. Herbarium data can also provide insights into the history and geographical extent of use that are not captured in publications.
... De nombreuses publications traitent de l'intérêt des collections botaniques (Funk 2003 ;Charpin, 2004 ;Mathez, 2008 ;Bebber et al., 2010), de la collecte des échantillons (Schnell, 1960 ;Letouzey, 1968 ;Cremers et Hoff, 1990 ;Egenberg & Moe, 1991 ;Bridson & Forman, 1998) et de la valorisation des données (Cremers et Hoff, 1990 ;Haripersaud, 2009 ;Delnatte, 2013 ;Delnatte et al., 2013 ;Lavoie, 2013 (townsend, 1999). Les informations rassemblées ici visent à accompagner des collègues qui comme nous se soucient de la transmission de ce patrimoine aux générations futures. ...
The management of botanical collections includes a range of functions. First of all, the preserva‑ tion of the naturalia needs a good deal of knowledge about risks, and ways and means to be handled in order to reduce them.
... Herbaria contain a wealth of information about the ecological and evolutionary history of living and extinct species (Funk, 2003). Despite the continuous decline in plant collecting and declining support for herbaria (Dalton, 2003;Prather et al., 2004a,b), there has been a recent surge of studies leveraging herbarium collections for diverse research projects not focused on systematics (Pyke & Ehrlich, 2010;Lees et al., 2011;Feeley, 2012;Lavoie, 2013;Hart et al., 2014). ...
Nonrandom collecting practices may bias conclusions drawn from analyses of herbarium records. Recent efforts to fully digitize and mobilize regional floras online offer a timely opportunity to assess commonalities and differences in herbarium sampling biases.
We determined spatial, temporal, trait, phylogenetic, and collector biases in c . 5 million herbarium records, representing three of the most complete digitized floras of the world: Australia ( AU ), South Africa ( SA ), and New England, USA ( NE ).
We identified numerous shared and unique biases among these regions. Shared biases included specimens collected close to roads and herbaria; specimens collected more frequently during biological spring and summer; specimens of threatened species collected less frequently; and specimens of close relatives collected in similar numbers. Regional differences included overrepresentation of graminoids in SA and AU and of annuals in AU ; and peak collection during the 1910s in NE , 1980s in SA , and 1990s in AU . Finally, in all regions, a disproportionately large percentage of specimens were collected by very few individuals. We hypothesize that these mega‐collectors, with their associated preferences and idiosyncrasies, shaped patterns of collection bias via ‘founder effects’.
Studies using herbarium collections should account for sampling biases, and future collecting efforts should avoid compounding these biases to the extent possible.
... In addition to specimens as biological objects for study, information derived from specimen labels has been recognised and exploited as another gold mine in the "big data" era that we have entered. Indeed, NHC provide outstanding data for statistical and model-based investigations about ecology, biogeography, and conservation biology including documentation of species decline, invasive species range extensions, impacts of global change, and the origins and distribution of disease agents (Lane, 1996;Shaffer & al., 1998;Funk, 2003;Lister & al., 2011;Lavoie, 2013;DiEuliis & al., 2016;Willis & al., 2017). ...
... As reported in "The Importance of Herbaria" by Vicki A. Funk (2003), "Herbaria, dried pressed plant specimens and their associated data, ancillary collections (e.g., photographs) and library materials, are remarkable and irreplaceable sources of information about plants and the world they inhabit. " They provide the comparative material that is essential for studies in taxonomy, systematics, ecology, anatomy, morphology, conservation biology, biodiversity, ethnobotany, and paleobiology. ...
The Archivio di Studi Adriatici (ASA) is a repository of the Institute of Marine Sciences (ISMAR-CNR) of Venice. The ASA repository, completely open source and open access, hosts natural collections, heritage books, documents, and maps of the Institute of Marine Sciences. It was developed following the discovery of a historical algal collection at the Biblioteca Storica di Studi Adriatici of Venice. This collection, after having been catalogued, has been digitized with a digital planetary scanner. Digitized specimens and metadata, compiled using Dublin Core and Simple Darwin Core formats, are hosted on a website, based on Fedora Repository and Islandora framework.
... Herbaria are irreplaceable resources; the long-term capital investment in specimen acquisition and curation that they represent is increasingly rewarded across many fields (Funk 2003). Our study, by explicitly quantifying ethnobotanical data from herbaria and literature, demonstrates that herbaria contain valuable information that can both supplement and complement literature reports. ...
The use of herbarium specimens as vouchers to support ethnobotanical surveys is well established. However, herbaria may be underutilized resources for ethnobotanical research that depends on the analysis of large datasets compiled across multiple sites. Here, we compare two medicinal use datasets, one sourced from published papers and the other from online herbaria to determine whether herbarium and published data are comparable and to what extent herbarium specimens add new data and fill gaps in our knowledge of geographical extent of plant use. Using Brazilian legumes as a case study, we compiled 1400 use reports from 105 publications and 15 Brazilian herbaria. Of the 319 species in 107 genera with cited medicinal uses, 165 (51%) were recorded only in the literature and 55 (17%) only on herbarium labels. Mode of application, plant part used, or therapeutic use was less often documented by herbarium specimen labels (17% with information) than publications (70%). However, medicinal use of 21 of the 128 species known from only one report in the literature was substantiated from independently collected herbarium specimens, and 58 new therapeutic applications, 25 new plant parts, and 16 new modes of application were added for species known from the literature. Thus, when literature reports are few or information-poor, herbarium data can both validate and augment these reports. Herbarium data can also provide insights into the history and geographical extent of use that are not captured in publications.
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12231-017-9367-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
... A herbáriumi gyűjtemények tudományban betöltött szerepe az utóbbi évtizedekben egyre inkább kezd előtérbe kerülni (Funk 2003, Takács et al. 2013. Napjainkban a technika fejlődésének köszönhetően lehetőség (és egyre több példa is) van az ilyen növénygyűjtemények lapjain szereplő, gyűjtésükre vonatkozó információk könnyen kezelhető adatbázisba rendezésére (Barkworth és Murrell 2012, Tulig et al. 2012, Balogh és Kulcsár 2013, E. Vojtkó et al. 2014, Seregin 2016. ...
Our aim was to digitalize and publish information on the vascular herbarium of the Balaton Museum in Keszthely (provisional acronym: KBM) in order to provide easier access to the data. The KBM is divided into four sub-collections: 1) collection of the late grammar school of Keszthely (KGH), 2) collection of Rezso Soó originated from the region Lake Balaton, 3) János Tuzson: Flora Exsiccata Planitiei Hungaricae and 4) collection of Miklós Frech'. All of the herbarium sheets were documented by digital photographs and after that all data from the labels were recorded in an MS Excel spreadsheet. The KBM consists of ca. 9000 specimens, among which the number of informative specimens is only 6563 and merely half of them originates from the Pannonian region. The most productive period of the collection's history spanned between 1818 and 1981. The number of specimens of the KGH is ca. 6000, the Soó's collection is 1585, the Frech's collection is 852 and the Tuzson's exsiccata is 673. Most of the sheets originated from Hungary (except for the majority of specimens of the KGH). The earliest collection was the KGH's (1810-1920s), then Soó's and Tuzson's collection (1920-1930s), and last was the Frech's sub-collection (1950-1980s). The collection represents mainly the region of the Lake Balaton: most of the Hungarian specimens of Soó, Frech' and KGH derives from there. The title is often inaccurate and in several cases only a geographical or historical region is shown as habitat on the labels of the foreign material of the KGH.
... Os herbários são fontes de informação ainda pouco exploradas pela historiografia; no entanto, mediante exsicatas e suas etiquetas de identificação, cadernetas de campo, livros de tombo, correspondências para intercâmbio, entre outros documentos, é possível acompanhar, por exemplo, as expedições realizadas e os cientistas que identificaram os espécimes coletados em diferentes tempos. Funk (2002) discute a importância de um herbário e lista 72 usos para eles, afirmando, entretanto, que tal lista de usos pode chegar facilmente a cem. ...
This article sheds light on Maria Bandeira, the first female botanist to work at the Botanic Garden of Rio de Janeiro. She was active in the 1920s, but is absent from the historiography and little cited in the scientific literature. The significant number of plant, fungus, and lichen specimens she collected, her capacity to reach far-flung places, her extensive correspondence with foreign experts, and her studies at Sorbonne are all sources for the analysis of the way botany was practiced and the social networks at play in science at the time. The end of her scientific career, when she adopted a cloistered life with the Barefoot Carmelite nuns, can be interpreted variously, and partially explains why her contributions to Brazilian botany have been forgotten.
... Revitalizing herbaria and natural history museums to engage the public more readily Museums and herbaria house natural history/systematics collections and are the window into biodiversity: past, present, and future (Funk, 2003a(Funk, , 2003bThomson, 2005;Johnson, 2015). Natural history museums serve a critical role in preserving our Earth's past and educating the public about the planet (Powers et al., 2014;Johnson, 2015). ...
Systematic biology is a discipline rooted in collections. These collections play important roles in research and conservation and are integral to our efforts to educate society about biodiversity and conservation. Collections provide an invaluable record of the distribution of organisms throughout the world and through recent and geological time, and they are the only direct documentation of the biological, physical, and cultural diversity of the planet: past, present, and future. Recent developments in bioinformatics and cyberinfrastructure are transforming systematics by opening up new opportunities and as a result major digitization efforts have increasingly made available large amounts of biodiversity data. The collections-based systematics community needs to train the next-generation of systematists with integrative skills, address grand questions about biodiversity at different scales, develop a community-wide cyberinfrastructure, effectively disseminate systematic data to biologists and the public, and proactively educate the public and policy makers on the importance of systematics and collections in the biodiversity crisis of the Anthropocene. Specifically, we call for a new global Biodiversity Cyberbank, comparable to GenBank for genetic data, to be the repository of all biodiversity data, as well as a World Organization of Systematic Biology to lead major initiatives of the field. We also outline a new workflow for taxonomic monographs, which utilizes both the traditional strengths of synthesizing diverse collections-based taxonomic data and the capacity of online resources and bioinformatics tools.
... However, adequate historical data for studying specific groups of organisms or regions may be very sparse or lacking. Another important source of historical information may stem from museum collections [21]. For example, herbarium specimens in conjunction with other data sources have allowed inferences to be made about drivers of floristic changes [22], probabilities of extinction [23], effects of urbanization on flowering phenology [24], and plant responses to climate change [25]- [28]. ...
By dint of historical herbarium specimens, we show how changes in species and habitat diversity can be reviewed and correlated with historical events. Our work is based on a digital database of specimens of the BOKU herbarium (WHB), which can be assigned to the Pannonian region of eastern Lower Austria. The complete dataset (n = 6655 specimens) was analyzed with the aid of statistical methods allowing computational elimination of collectorsʼ effects (i.e. unbalanced collecting interests of collectors over time; multiple regression analysis, general linear model), from the first herbarium specimens (dating back to 1830) to the present. As a result, a significant decrease in the proportion of species of some habitats (above all water bodies and closely associated habitats, humid and wet meadows, fens and fen meadows, and nutrient poor grassland) was detected. For water-influenced habitats, this decrease correlates with the time of Danube regulation. Moreover, an increase in the proportion of species of ruderal sites was asserted during the observation period. The analysis procedure developed can be used for evaluation of major digitized herbaria in order to trace historical changes in species and habitat diversity.
... A herbáriumok klasszikus szerepén (növények megismerése, taxonok típuspéldányainak őrzése, előfordulásuk és elterjedésük dokumentálása) túl egyre több újszerű felhasználási lehetőségre derül fény. Erre hívja fel a figyelmet néhány, az utóbbi időben megjelent szemle (FUNK 2003, SUAREZ & TSUTSUI 2004, LISTER et al. 2011, PYKE & EHRLICH 2010, LAVOIE 2013, TAKÁCS et al. 2013), amelyek herbáriumi adatsorokra alapozott tanulmányokat tekintenek át és a felhasználási lehetőségek sokrétűségét igazolják. A herbáriumi munka azonban jellegéből adódóan meglehetősen időigényes. ...
The paper introduces the herbarium of Debrecen University (DE). All specimens of the herbarium were documented by digital photographs, and all data from the labels were entered into an Excel spreadsheet. The largest collection of Herbarium DE, the "Soó Rezső Herbarium" (abbreviation: SRH) consists of ca. 38.000 specimens from almost all European countries, but mainly from Hungary and the neighbouring countries. Most of the specimens originate from Hajdú-Bihar, Pest, Győr-Moson-Sopron, Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén, Veszprém and Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg counties. The SRH stores a considerable amount of original/authentic specimens collected by Hungarian botanists, primarily by Rezső Soó and his followers, as well as Sándor Polgár. The most rapid growth of the SRH took place in the first half of the last century (1930–1950). By contrast, the collection was practically not developed between 1955 and 2000. After the millennium it started to grow again. Data on the most substantial part of the SRH covering native plants collected in the present-day Hungary are summarized in Electronic Appendix 1. (incl. taxon name, settlement, collecting date, collector, file name of documentary photograph).
... Floristic data gathered from herbarium collections are important to understanding the biodiversity of Greene County, Arkansas, as well as any other region of the world. Funk (2003) stressed the importance of herbaria by listing their many uses. Herbarium collections are a valuable resource for scientists, land managers, conservation agencies, and anyone who is otherwise interested in the botanical heritage of a region. ...
We present a floristic list of Greene County, Arkansas, based on accessioned collections from the Arkansas State University Herbarium (STAR). Currently, there are 1569 specimens representing 540 taxa from Greene County in STAR. Using the USDA Plants Database, plant species were analyzed according to whether or not they are native to the state as well as whether or not they have been previously documented as species occurring in the county. Having analyzed all the Greene County collections from STAR, we found 225 previously undocumented species. The data suggest that most of the specimens in the STAR collection were found in wooded areas and/or near water. This may be a reflection of sampling bias as two of the primary collectors of these specimens were primarily interested in bog habitats. For this reason, the Greene County collections may not fully represent all habitats in the county, but it is likely that they are a good representation of the county's seeps and bogs. The STAR Herbarium is emerging as a critical resource for understanding botanical diversity in the eastern counties of Arkansas, but it is clear that additional collections are necessary to fully represent all habitats in these areas.
Background
Herbarium collections and the data they hold are the main sources of plant biodiversity information. These collections contain taxonomical and spatial data on living and extinct species; consequently, they are the fundamental basis for temporal and spatial biogeographical studies of plants. Mega projects focused on providing digital and free
access to accurate biodiversity data have transformed plant science research, mainly in the past two decades. In this sense, researchers today are overwhelmed by the many different datasets in online repositories. There are also several challenges involved in
using these data for biogeographical analyses. Analyses performed on the data available in the repositories show that 70-75% of the total amount of data have spatial deficiencies and a high number of records lack coordinates. This shortage of reliable primary biogeographical information creates serious impediments for biogeographical analyses and conservation assessments and taxonomic revisions consequently produces obstacles for evaluations of threats to biodiversity at global, regional and local levels. With the aim of
contributing to botanical and biogeographical research, this paper provides georeferenced spatial data for angiosperm species endemic to Brazil. The information from two reliable online databases, i.e. the Flora do Brasil 2020 floristic database (BFG) and Plantas do
Brasil: Resgate Histórico e Herbário Virtual para o Conhecimento e Conservação da FloraBrasileira (REFLORA), which are both based on records collected over the course of the last two centuries, is used to create this spatial dataset.
New information
We provide three taxonomically-edited and georeferenced datasets for basal angiosperms, monocots and eudicots, covering a total of 14,992 endemic species from Brazil. Producing this consolidated dataset involved several months of detailed revision of coordinates and
nomenclaturally updating of the names in these datasets. The information provided in this geo-referenced dataset, covering two centuries of specimen collections, will contribute to several botanical and mainly biogeographical studies.
Species records from biological collections are becoming increasingly available online. This unprecedented availability of records has largely supported recent studies in taxonomy, bio-geography, macro-ecology, and biodiversity conservation. Biological collections vary in their documentation and notation standards, which have changed through time. For different reasons, neither collections nor data repositories perform the editing, formatting and standardization of the data, leaving these tasks to the final users of the species records (e.g. taxonomists, ecologists and conservationists). These tasks are challenging, particularly when working with millions of records from hundreds of biological collections.
To help collection curators and final users to perform those tasks, we introduce plantR an open-source package that provides a comprehensive toolbox to manage species records from biological collections. The package is accompanied by the proposal of a reproducible workflow to manage this type of data in taxonomy, ecology and biodiversity conservation. It is implemented in R and designed to handle relatively large data sets as fast as possible. Initially designed to handle plant species records, many of the plantR features also apply to other groups of organisms, given that the data structure is similar.
The plantR workflow includes tools to (1) download records from different data repositories, (2) standardize typical fields associated with species records, (3) validate the locality, geographical coordinates, taxonomic nomenclature and species identifications, including the retrieval of duplicates across collections, and (4) summarize and export records, including the construction of species checklists with vouchers.
Other R packages provide tools to tackle some of the workflow steps described above. But in addition to the new features and resources related to the data editing and validation, the greatest strength of plantR is to provide a comprehensive and user-friendly workflow in one single environment, performing all tasks from data retrieval to export. Thus, plantR can help researchers to better assess data quality and avoid data leakage in a wide variety of studies using species records.
Plant systematics is fundamental for understanding and interpreting the living diversity of the world. In recent years, plant systematics has made rapid progress and has witnessed
impressive advances in floristic inventorying, incorporation of new types of comparative
data, quantitative concepts, methods of phylogeny reconstruction, and classification. In
order to disseminate this vast data, there is a need to make available the exciting new
developments in the field of plant systematics to the undergraduate and post-graduate
students. This book is designed to introduce the students to the fundamentals of
systematics in a simple, concise, and balanced manner. The book aims to equip the
students with the basics of plant taxonomy and at the same time also update them with
the most recent advances in the field of plant systematics.
The Mediterranean Sea is currently experiencing a decline in the abundance of several key species, as a consequence of anthropogenic pressures (e.g., increase in human population, habitat modification and loss, pollution, coastal urbanization, overexploitation, introduction of non-indigenous species and climate change). Herbaria and natural history collections are certainly fundamental for taxonomic studies, but they are also an invaluable, if currently underestimated, resource for understanding ecological and evolutionary responses of species to environmental changes. Macroalgae herbarium collections, which are really consistent (ranging from 200,000 to approximately 500,000 specimens) in some European herbaria (e.g., Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, University of Copenhagen, Natural History Museum in Kensington), can be successfully used as real “witnesses” to biodiversity changes. In this respect, we report some case studies from the Mediterranean Sea which summarize well the potential of macroalgae herbarium specimens to provide useful data on biodiversity changes. Indeed, these data enable the evaluation of the responses of biota, including shifts in species ranges, the detection of the presence of introduced species, and the prediction of changes in species distributions and patterns under future climate scenarios. To increase the use of this invaluable tool of research, their curation, the digitization of collections, and specimen genomics should be even more addressed.
Herbarium collections provide an essential basis for a wide array of biological research and, with development of DNA-based methods, they have become an invaluable material for genetic analyses. Yet, the use of such material is hindered by technical limitations related to DNA degradation and to quantity of biological material. The latter is inherent for some biological groups, as best exemplified by myxomycetes which form minute sporophores. It is estimated that ca. two-thirds of myxomycete taxa are represented by extremely scanty material. As DNA isolation methods applied so far in myxomycete studies require destructive sampling of many sporophores, a large part of described diversity of the group remains unavailable for phylogenetic studies or barcoding. Here, we tested several procedures of DNA isolation and amplification to seek for an efficient and possibly non-destructive method of sampling. Tests were based on herbarium specimens of 19 species representing different taxonomic orders. We assayed several variants of isolation based on silica gel membrane columns, and a newly designed procedure using highly reduced amount of biological material (small portion of spores), based on fine disruption of spores and direct PCR. While the most frequently used column-based method led to PCR success in 89.5% of samples when a large amount of material was used, its performance dropped to 52% when based on single sporophores. Single sporophores provided amplicons in 89.5% of samples when using a kit dedicated to low-amount DNA samples. Our new procedure appeared the most effective (94.7%) while it used only a small fraction of spores, being nearly non-destructive; it was also the most cost-effective. We thus demonstrate that combination of adequate handling of spore micro-disruption coupled with application of direct PCR can be an efficient way to circumvent technical limitations for genetic studies in myxomycetes and thus can substantially improve taxon sampling for phylogeny and barcoding. Additionally, this approach gives a unique possibility to apply both molecular and morphological assays to the same structure (sporophore), which then can be further stored as documentation.
Un herbario es una colección científica de plantas, cuyos ejemplares han sido colectados en el campo, prensados, secados, montados sobre cartulinas y debidamente identificados. De esta forma, los herbarios conservan la materia prima para poder realizar investigación botánica y fomentar el conocimiento sobre la conservación, distribución, ecología y taxonomía, así como los usos de las plantas.
https://editor.editafacil.es/visor/index.aspx?p=FFFFFFFFFC3C42C7&tp=182
The herbaria has been indispensable and unsurpassable in the range of tools of botanical research for centuries. Traditionally, natural history collections play an important role for example in representing nomenclatural types of taxa, and documenting their distribution. Nowadays, herbarium specimens are used as never before to document the impacts of global change. During the last decades applications of herbaria in research of invasion, environmental pollution, phenology, climate change, plant interactions, ecology, conservation biology, molecular taxonomy, phylogenetics and pharmacobotany proved a valuable tool. In this paper such utilizations of herbaria are reviewed briefly, based on data of 86 scientific publications. The multiple possibilities and limitations of herbaria are illustrated by some examples, unambiguously reinforcing the usefulness of collecting for scientific purposes.
For the past year or so I have been keeping a list of uses of herbaria. Two recent events have greatly increased that list. First, I published an article titled "The Importance of Herbaria" (Funk 2003) and a number of my colleagues sent in additional uses. Second, I attended a "Workshop to Produce a Decadal Vision for Taxonomy and Natural History Collections" (held in Gainsville, Florida, sponsored by NSF). In preparing for the workshop the list increased to ca. 50 and during the workshop additional uses were mentioned and the current total is 72. Herbaria, dried pressed plant specimens and their associated collections data, ancillary collections (e.g., photographs) and library materials, are remarkable and irreplaceable sources of information about plants and the world they inhabit. They provide the comparative material that is essential for studies in taxonomy, systematics, ecology, anatomy, morphology, conservation biology, biodiversity, ethnobotany, and paleobiology, as well as being used for teaching and by the public. They are a veritable gold mine of information and the foundation of comparative biology. According to the updated website of Index Herbariorum (Holmgren & Holmgren, 2003), there are 3240 herbaria in the world. Just in the USA there are more than 60 million specimens in 628 herbaria (Funk and Morin, 2000). At the US National Herbarium (National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution) there are nearly 5 million specimens, and, just for the record, about 500,000 of the US specimens are in the Compositae. Recent articles have highlighted the problems that are being faced by state and university natural history collections, including herbaria. An article from Nature (Dalton, 2003) and one from BioScience (Gropp, 2003) make it clear that natural history collections are being targeted unfairly in the current budget crises in states and universities. From Los Angeles to Iowa, Nebraska and Virginia, natural history collections are being closed or given away and the staff either re-assigned or fired. All of this has a negative impact on our ability to train systematists (Gropp 2003) and causes much concern over the fate of organismal biology. Hopefully lists such as this one will help those fighting to save their collections from death or dismemberment.
El herbario es una colección de plantas, de ser posible con todas sus partes, flores, frutos y semillas, susceptibles de conservarse por tiempo indefinido y que sirven de apoyo para la investigación en el campo de la taxonomía, ecología, morfología y todo aquello relacionado con el estudio de la botánica. La forma de realizar las labores básicas en un herbario (colecta, prensado y secado, montaje, intercalado, etc.) está ampliamente documentada, sin embargo existe poca información respecto al establecimiento de la misión, objetivos y políticas de crecimiento, específicos para cada unidad. Ante estos retos, se presenta un modelo alternativo para la administración de herbarios que proporciona una visión integral de sus actividades, muestra relaciones con otros sistemas y sugiere parámetros de desempeño para evaluar los objetivos. Resulta útil para los herbarios ya establecidos que no cuentan con un plan formal de trabajo, como para aquellos de nueva creación.
Medicinal plants are sources of important therapeutic aid for alleviating human ailments. With increasing realization of the health hazards and toxicity associated with the indiscriminate use of synthetic drugs and antibiotics, interest in the use of plants and plant-based drugs has revived throughout the world. However, a large number of medicinal plants remain to be investigated for their possible pharmacological value. Most of the pharmaceutical in-dustry is highly dependent on wild populations for the supply of raw materials for extraction of medicinally impor-tant compounds. Due to a lack of proper cultivation practices, destruction of plant habitats, and the illegal and indiscriminate collection of plants from these habitats, many medicinal plants are severely threatened. Advanced biotechnological methods of culturing plant cells and tissues should provide new means of conserving and rapidly propagating valuable, rare, and endangered medicinal plants. This paper describes the work carried out at the Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute and Chaoyang University of Technology on in vitro propagation of some important medicinal plants.
Averyanov L., P. Cribb, Phan Ke Loc, Nguyen Tien Hiep. 2003. Slipper Orchids of Vietnam. With an Introduction to the Flora of Vietnam. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Compass Press Limited. 308 p. ISBN 1 84246 047 1
Utilization of clones is an important component in the economic production of orchids. Controlled cultivation is possible and effective only when plants are uniform. Among the three major orchids produced in Japan, only Cymbidium production starts with plantlets multiplied from shoot tips cultured in vitro. These shoot tips produce protocorm-like bodies (PLBs). Shoot development follows PLB formation in many standard-type Cymbidium hybrids. Several miniature-type Cymbidium cultivars and/or temperate species are an exception. Mass rapid clonal propagation (MRCP) of standard-type Cymbidium is fairly easy and was the first to be utilized for commercial production. In nobile-type Dendrobium production, multiplication by traditional cuttings is common. Difficulties in the formation of PLB and a higher risk of somaclonal mutations hinder practical utilization of MRCP in these orchids. Seedlings are used for Phalaenopsis production. Phalaenopsis is a monopodial orchid, which means that research that utilizes shoot tips damages the mother plants. This has created difficulties, and development of MRCP procedures has been delayed. Several MRCP methods using plant parts other than shoot tips have been developed recently, and production of clones has started.
Old statistics are available regarding orchid production in Aichi prefecture in Japan. The value of orchids produced in 1965 was 15 730 000 yen ($43 694, $1 = 360 yen). In 1991 production reached 6 887 181 000 yen ($49 194 150, $1 = 140 yen), which is a 438-fold increase in 26 years. Production of all potted ornamental plants increased 1.93-fold in pot number and 4.45-fold in volume between 1975 and 1991. The increase in potted orchid production was considerably greater, being 2.45-fold in number and 7.95-fold in volume (Fig. 5-1). The total production of pot plants in Japan during 1991 was 204 762 000 pots valued at 100 564 797 000 yen ($718 319 979). Orchid pot-production was 8.4% (17 211 000) of the number of pots and 29.7% ($213 341 457) of the volume. Production of orchid-pots in Aichi prefecture alone was 27.9% of the number and 23.1% of the volume (Figs. 5-2, 5-3 ).
The author has lived in the plant tissue culture history since its beginning and had the opportunity to discuss with all the
pioneers.
Then in the present contribution he expresses personal memories, some of them being almost unknown.
The tissue culture problem was suggested as soon as 1838 by Schleiden and Schwann's cell theory. The first experimental approach
was vainly tried by Haberlandt in 1902.
Following Carrel's success with animal cells, encouraging results were obtained on plants tissues by Gautheret in 1934 and
the problem was definitely solved in 1939, independently by Gautheret, Nobécourt and White.
The progress was slow because this new field interested only a few people. However in 1954 the principal chapters of this
subject were already opened: Tissue culture, cell culture, improving of nutrients, especially of growth substances, expertness
of organ formation and vegetative propagation, attempts to obtain secondary products and application to pathological problems.
Later, in 1966 the androgenesis was initiated by Guha and Maheshwari, while Küster's pioneer work on protoplast fusion was
exhumed and brought about innumerable investigations.
Finally, for the past ten years plant tissue culture has truly exploded and now more than ten thousand people are engaged
in this field: International Congress held in July 1982 at Lake Yamanaka, Japan is evidence for this effusive development.
Incluye bibliografía e índice
Morphological measurements were made on populations of Arabidopsis thaliana grown from seed for 21 days under essentially constant environmental conditions except for the influence of gravitational or centrifugal accelerations. Growth conditions were what had been proposed for experiments in an artificial satellite. Observations are reported for plants grown at normal 1-g upright or on horizontal clinostats and for plants grown on a centrifuge. Increased g-force, up to 15 times normal, was found to have significant but small effects on some morphological end points. The plants' sensitivity to the magnitude of the g-force was much less than to its vector direction.Data from centrifuge experiments (which determined the g-functions for particular characters) were extrapolated to zero-g to predict a set of morphological characteristics of a plant developing in the satellite environment. As an alternative means of predicting properties of a zero-g plant, characteristics of plants grown on horizontal clinostats were measured. The results of these two predictive methods were not in agreement.Clinostat grown plants were morphologically distinct from upright stationary controls. When plants were grown while rotating in the upright position on vertical clinostats they were similar to stationary plants also grown upright, but there were small differences some of which were statistically significant.
Introduction to the Shore Wildflowers of California Introduction to Trees of the
- Berkeley Way
- Berkeley
US$16.95) 341 pp. University of California Press,
2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720.
Introduction to the Shore Wildflowers of
California, Oregon, and Washington Revised
Edition. Munz, Philip A. Edited by Lake, Dianne and
Phyllis M. Faber. 2003. ISBN 0-520-23639-4 (Paper
US$16.95) 256 pp. University of California Press,
2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720.
Introduction to Trees of the San Francisco Bay
Region. Keator, Glenn. 2003. ISBN 0-520-23007-8
(Paper US$14.95) 264 pp. University of California
Press, 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720.
Keywords & Concepts in Evolutionary Developmental Biology. Hall, Brian K and Wendy M. Olson.
2003. ISBN 0-674-0094-5 (Cloth US$59.95) 476 pp.
(Paper US$60.00) 303 pp 44 Brattle Street, 4 th Floor BSA Contact Information All inquiries for the BSA Business Office should be directed to: Executive Director: William Dahl and / or Administrative Coordinator
- Swanton
Swanton. 2003. ISBN 0-85199-528-4 (Paper
US$60.00) 303 pp. CABI Publishing, 44 Brattle
Street, 4 th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138.
BSA Contact Information
All inquiries for the BSA Business Office should be
directed to:
Executive Director: William Dahl and / or
Administrative Coordinator: Wanda Lovan
BSA Business Office
Botanical Society of America, Inc.
4474 Castleman Avenue
P.O. Box 299
95) 340 pp. Timber Press, 133 S.W. Second Avenue, Suite 450. Portland, OR 97204-3527. Specialty Cut Flowers: The Production of Annuals, Perennials, Bulbs, and Woody Plants for Fresh and Dried Cut Flowers
- Allan M Armitage
- Judy M Laushman
ISBN 0-88192-584-5 (Cloth US$24.95) 340 pp.
Timber Press, 133 S.W. Second Avenue, Suite 450.
Portland, OR 97204-3527.
Specialty Cut Flowers: The Production of
Annuals, Perennials, Bulbs, and Woody Plants for
Fresh and Dried Cut Flowers, 2 nd ed. Armitage,
Allan M. and Judy M. Laushman. 2003. ISBN 0-
88192-579-9 (Cloth US$39.95) 636 pp. Timber Press,
133 S.W. Second Avenue, Suite 450. Portland, OR
97204-3527.
ISBN 0- 8263-2864-4 (Cloth US$29.95) 160 pp. University of New Mexico Press
- Maya Medicine
Maya Medicine: Traditional Healing in
Yucatán. Kunow, Mairanna Appel. 2003. ISBN 0-
8263-2864-4 (Cloth US$29.95) 160 pp. University of
New Mexico Press, 1720 Lomas Boulevard NE,
Albuquerque, NM 87131-1591.
Methods for Risk Assessment of Transgenic
Plants: IV Biodiversity and Biotechnology.
ISBN 1-55591-475-6 (Paper US$29.95) 368 pp. Fulcrum Publishing, 16100 Table Mountain Parkway Natural Growth Inhibitors and Phytohormones in Plants and Environment. Kefeli, Valentine I. and Maria V. Kalevitch
- Native Plants
- High-Elevation Western Gardens
- Janice Busco
- Nancy R Morin
Native Plants for High-Elevation Western
Gardens. Busco, Janice and Nancy R. Morin. 2003.
ISBN 1-55591-475-6 (Paper US$29.95) 368 pp.
Fulcrum Publishing, 16100 Table Mountain Parkway,
Suite 300, Golden, CO 80403.
Natural Growth Inhibitors and Phytohormones
in Plants and Environment. Kefeli, Valentine I. and
Maria V. Kalevitch. 2003. ISBN 1-4020-1069-9.
(Cloth US$118.00) 323 pp. Kluwer Academic
Publishers B.V. P.O. Box 989, 3300 AZ Dordrecht,
The Netherlands.
A Modern Edition of a Classic Sixteenth-Century Manual
- Chinese Medicinal
Chinese Medicinal Herbs: A Modern Edition of
a Classic Sixteenth-Century Manual. Shih-Chen,
Li, Porter Smith and C.a. Stuart (eds). 2003. ISBN0-
486-42801-X (Paper US$21.95) 508pp. Dover
Publications, 31 East 2 nd Street, Mineola, New York
11501.
Studies on tissue culture of Chinese medicinal plant resources in Taiwan and their sustainable utilization References: Cronquist A. 1993. An Integrated System of Classification of Flowering Plants
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Nalawade, S. M., A. P. Sagaea, C.-Y. Lee, C.-L. Kao, and
H.-S. Tsay. 2003. Studies on tissue culture of Chinese
medicinal plant resources in Taiwan and their sustainable
utilization. Botanical Bulletin of Academia Sinica (Taiwan)
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Cronquist A. 1993. An Integrated System of Classification
of Flowering Plants. Columbia University Press, NY.
ISBN 0-520-23329-8 (Paper US$19.98) 232 pp Photobiology of Higher Plants ISBN 0-470-85523-1 (Paper US$ 55.00) 354 pp The Atrium, Southern Gate Plant Derived Antimycotics: Current Trends and Future Prospects
- L Davide
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