HUH Seminar Series - The growing role for herbaria in biodiversity research

Isaac Eckert, PhD Candidate, McGill University

Abstract: Natural history collections like herbaria were once foundational to our knowledge of the natural world. Now however, as we develop and invest in new sources of biodiversity data, from community science initiatives to artificial intelligence, is the utility of natural collections like herbaria in decline? Approaching herbaria from a macroecological perspective, I demonstrate that not only has the scientific importance of our collections continued to increase, but it will likely continue to do so into the future. Focusing first on Canada, I show that the simple occurrence data contributed by herbarium specimens outperforms contemporary data sources like community science when it comes to capturing the diversity and distribution of vascular plants. In the sparse and heavily biased Canadian data landscape, the data stored in herbaria prove vital to our ability to model biodiversity. Zooming out to global scales, I identify similar patterns in the increased ability of herbarium collections to represent a wide breadth of environmental conditions. Moreover, unlike other data sources, the physical specimens that comprise herbarium collections contain irreplaceable historical data. The preserved physical material for example, can be sequenced to obtain historical genetic data, which can be combined across specimens, institutions, and sometimes even continents to reconstruct populations that can be used to track and monitor genetic change through time. If mobilized, the genetic data housed in collections like herbaria could transform our understanding of macrogenetic patterns and help test how species are responding to past and present global change.