Worldwide natural history collections contain more than three billion specimens assembled over hundreds of years, an irreplaceable physical record of life. Though there is bias inherent in their composition — from a disproportionate number of roadside plants to the dismissal of traditional ecological knowledge that could have expanded our understanding far sooner — we rely on them to gather data on the past, decipher the present, and forecast the future of the changing Earth. With modern technology, they can answer questions that their original collectors never dreamed of. Who knows what further mysteries they hold? Below, scientists explain their efforts to unravel some of those mysteries.
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Prof. Jacob Suissa, University of Tennessee
My research explores the evolutionary processes generating plant diversity using both large-scale analyses with datasets of thousands of species and small-scale analyses focusing on a single organism. At both scales, I use herbarium specimens as the basis for my data collection. The rich history of these collections allows me to access data on a variety of species and traits, ranging from global occurrence records to plant material for anatomical investigation. In a recent project with UVM's Pringle Herbarium, we used 800,000 records to document global patterns of fern biodiversity and found that tropical and subtropical montane hotspots harbor 58% of fern species richness despite comprising just 7% of Earth’s land.
Several of these scientists spoke at the University of Michigan's virtual Early Career Scientists Symposium of 2021, Natural History Collections: Drivers of Innovation.
