The Importance of Herbarium Records in Environmental Science
- Author
- Kylah Farley, Collections Intern
- Date
- February 20, 2025
As I was starting off my collections internship at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, I was not familiar with just how important herbarium records can be in the field of environmental science. When I think about research in the field of environmental science, my mind goes straight to observational experiments or current environmental samplings. However, after my time at the museum, I will now be thinking about how specimens from the past can help us understand our present. During this internship, I was able to be a part of this process by cataloguing, digitizing, and integrating specimens into our collections, so people could use them for research purposes.
Despite just how many herbarium records there are and how useful these records are to illustrate the environment, they are an underused resource in the field. Digitizing these herbarium records have played a huge role in making them more accessible to promote this type of research. Plant specimens act as a great resource to inquire about past environments because plants cannot move. They are exposed directly to environmental changes and it shows in their composition. By studying these plants, we can learn about the environment they lived in and how it changed over time compared to other specimens.
All herbarium records have data about when and where the specimens were collected, and that information can be used to learn about the plants’ history. For example, it can help us determine when certain plants started invading other ecosystems and if there were any historical causes for this invasion. This has been particularly helpful in my internship research paper about an invasive species in the United States. The early records of plant species help determine around what time the species was introduced and at what point the species had become invasive to the surrounding environment. The locality data can also help determine any habitat changes and abundance changes of the plants. In modern research, this type of data can be useful to finding species in the wild that are endangered or thought to be extinct (Figg). By using this data for rediscovery purposes, we can use current conservation strategies to restore biodiversity.
Plants uptake the nutrients in their environment, so they are a good representation of the pollution levels in their area. For example, by doing chemical analyses on the specimens' roots, we can determine the amount of heavy-metal intake (Lang). In a similar fashion, we can determine the amount of anthropogenic nitrogen a plant has been exposed to. Both of these methods involve a process called ‘destructive analysis’, which requires a very small piece of a plant specimen to be ground up and used in chemical analysis. This provides different information that can be discerned by examination of the physical plant specimen. Examination of a plants’ morphology can inform the levels of nitrogen or carbon dioxide in a plant. For example, looking at stomatal densities on plant leaves can be a great indicator of a plants’ exposure to CO2 (Lang). By comparing the data from these records we can also infer about plants’ responses to climate change. For example, we can see the gradual movement of plant species as they shift from habitats with unfavorable environmental conditions to ones that are more favorable (Lang).
Flowering of a plant is another important indication of climate change throughout history. Time of flowering can be determined by using the collection dates and the phenology of the specimen to estimate when the flowering occurred and how that could be related to climate change.
By digitizing and cataloguing the specimens in our collection, we make it easier for people to use these records for scientific research. These historical plant specimens are one-of-a-kind and must be preserved and integrated carefully in order to promote using this method for research. It was a great opportunity to be involved in this process and learn more about herbariums and their importance in the environmental science field.
Sources
Dolan, R. W., Moore, M. E., & Stephens, J. D. (2011). Documenting effects of urbanization on Flora Using Herbarium Records. Journal of Ecology , 99 (4), 1055–1062. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365...
Figg, P., & Viruel, J. (2024, November 19). How do herbarium specimens help save plants from extinction? . Royal Botanical Gardens. https://www.kew.org/read-and-w...
Lang, P. L., Willems, F. M., Scheepens, J. F., Burbano, H. A., & Bossdorf, O. (2018). Using Herbaria to Study Global Environmental Change . https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj....