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. 2019 Jan;221(1):110-122.
doi: 10.1111/nph.15401. Epub 2018 Aug 30.

Using herbaria to study global environmental change

Patricia L M Lang  1 , Franziska M Willems  2 , J F Scheepens  2 , Hernán A Burbano  1 , Oliver Bossdorf  2
Affiliations

Using herbaria to study global environmental change

Patricia L M Lang et al. New Phytol. 2019 Jan.

Abstract

During the last centuries, humans have transformed global ecosystems. With their temporal dimension, herbaria provide the otherwise scarce long-term data crucial for tracking ecological and evolutionary changes over this period of intense global change. The sheer size of herbaria, together with their increasing digitization and the possibility of sequencing DNA from the preserved plant material, makes them invaluable resources for understanding ecological and evolutionary species' responses to global environmental change. Following the chronology of global change, we highlight how herbaria can inform about long-term effects on plants of at least four of the main drivers of global change: pollution, habitat change, climate change and invasive species. We summarize how herbarium specimens so far have been used in global change research, discuss future opportunities and challenges posed by the nature of these data, and advocate for an intensified use of these 'windows into the past' for global change research and beyond.

Keywords: ancient DNA; biological invasions; climate change; habitat change; herbarium; phenology; pollution.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Herbaria as global change witnesses. (a) Timeline of global change, with lines tracking changes in world population, air temperature and atmospheric CO 2 during the last c. 200 years. Dashed line ends indicate future projections. Bars below plot indicate the typical temporal extent of herbarium samples vs observational studies and experiments. (Population growth: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2017); World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/; temperature: representative concentration pathway 8.5, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, www.ipcc.ch; (Marcott et al., 2013); CO 2: (Neftel et al., 1994)). (b) Map with global distribution of herbaria (for visual clarity displaying only herbaria of > 100 000 specimens), names of the largest 10 herbaria, and number of herbaria and herbarium specimens curated per continent (reflecting places of storage of specimens, not their origins; Herbarium data from Index Herbariorum, http://sweetgum.nybg.org/science/api/v1/institutions/. Accessed in April 2018).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Diversity of herbarium data and their applications. Herbarium sheet in the centre surrounded by types of data that can be obtained from a specimen, with the questions that these data can help to answer around, ordered by respective global change driver. Symbols indicate the type of data used to address each question.
Figure B1
Figure B1
Typical molecular characteristics of herbarium DNA. (a) Fragment size distribution and (b) damage pattern found in ancient DNA (sample data from Weiß et al. (2016), publicly available at ENA ID ERR964451).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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