2025-09-11
Life after herbarium digitisation: Physical and digital collections, curation and use
Publication
Publication
Plants, people, planet , Volume 2025
Herbarium management has traditionally focused on providing direct access to the physical specimens, but this scope must now expand to also embrace digital collections. Advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence and high-throughput genomics are increasing the amount of information that can be extracted from specimens, and it is becoming commonplace to provide digital access to specimen images and collection metadata. These developments are facilitating the use of herbarium collections to inform conservation planning and in studies plant and fungal taxonomy, distribution and evolution. This paper examines how herbaria are transitioning from physical specimen-centric collection management practices to increasingly digitised curation, and the effects that digital availability of data are having on demands for physical access. We provide a set of recommendations to institutions holding herbarium collections. We emphasise the critical importance of further digitising herbaria of all sizes; the need to ensure that historical inequalities in deposition of specimens are not perpetuated; and that the capacity to utilise new technologies must be further developed, especially in biodiverse regions from which most herbarium collections are derived. To improve access to collection data, herbarium managers need to more rigorously adopt community-agreed data standards, and more strongly support open access platforms such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility either directly or through regional coalitions. As digitisation and open data access increase, herbaria will need to offer users with seamless hybrid access to physical and digital records while continuing to develop their collections to advance research and conservation.
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| doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.70078 | |
| Plants, people, planet | |
| Released under the CC-BY 4.0 (“Attribution 4.0 International”) License | |
| Organisation | Staff publications |
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Paton, Alan James, Ameka, Gabriel K., Antonelli, Alexandre, Asase, Alex, Barrett, Russell L., Bogaerts, Ann, … Young, Andrew. (2025). Life after herbarium digitisation: Physical and digital collections, curation and use. Plants, people, planet, 2025. doi:10.1002/ppp3.70078 |
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