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. Daniel Park, Purdue University
Herbarium collections represent snapshots of biological events in space and time. My collaborators and I have used herbarium specimens to study the patterns and drivers of plant phenology. With the help of citizen scientists, we quantify buds, flowers, and fruit from tens of thousands of digital images of specimens and can thus infer the timing of reproductive events. Along these lines, we have uncovered extensive variation in phenological sensitivity to temperature both within and among species. With continuing climate change, flowering time differences among co-occurring species and individuals are likely to change as well, altering species interactions and gene flow.
Several of these scientists spoke at the University of Michigan's virtual Early Career Scientists Symposium of 2021, Natural History Collections: Drivers of Innovation.
