What is a herbarium?

A herbarium is a collection of preserved plants stored, catalogued and

arranged systematically for study by both professional taxonomists
(scientists who name and identify plants), botanists and amateurs.

The creation of a herbarium specimen involves the pressing and drying of

plants between sheets of paper, a practice that has changed very little since
the beginning, 500 years ago. Thanks to this simple technique, most of the
characteristics of living plants are visible on the dried plant. The few that are
not (e.g. flower colour, scent, height of a tree, vegetation type) are written on
the collection label by the collector. Most importantly, the label should tell us
where and when the specimen was collected.

A working reference collection

A herbarium acts like a plant library or vast catalogue with each of our three
million specimens providing unique information – where it was found, when
it flowered, what it looks like and it’s DNA, which remains intact for many
years. DNA is now routinely extracted from herbarium specimens. The most
important specimens are called 'types'. The type specimen, chosen by the
author of the species name, becomes the physical reference for the new
species.

This unique working reference collection brings species from all over the
world together into one place to be discovered, described and compared. The
work is disseminated through the writing of Floras (a description of all the
plants in a country or region), monographs (a description of plants or fungi
within a group, such as a family) and scientific papers. This fundamental
research provides an essential baseline for other plant-based research and
helps inform conservation practices.

Herbarium, collection of dried plant specimens mounted on sheets of

paper. The plants are usually collected in situ (e.g., where they were
growing in nature), identified by experts, pressed, and then carefully
mounted to archival paper in such a way that all major morphological
characteristics are visible (i.e., both sides of the leaves and the floral
structures). The mounted plants are labeled with their proper scientific
names, the name of the collector, and, usually, information about where
they were collected and how they grew and general observations. The
specimens are commonly filed in cases according to families and genera
and are available for ready reference.
Herbarium collections are often housed in botanical gardens, arboretums,
natural history museums, and universities. The largest herbaria, many of
which are in Europe, contain several million specimens, some of which
date back hundreds of years. Herbaria are the “dictionaries” of the plant
kingdom and provide comparative material that is indispensable for studies
in plant taxonomy and systematics. Given that nearly every plant species
has a dried “type specimen” on which its description and Latin name are
based, taxonomic disputes are commonly resolved by referencing type
specimens in herbaria. The collections are also essential to the proper
naming of unknown plants and to the identification of new species.
In addition to their taxonomic import, herbaria are commonly used in the
fields of ecology, plant anatomy and morphology, conservation
biology, biogeography, ethnobotany, and paleobotany. The sheets provide
biogeographic information that can be used to document the historic ranges
of plants, to locate rare or endangered species, or to trace the expeditions
of explorers and plant collectors. Physically, the specimens are important
sources of genetic material for DNA analyses and
of pollen for palynological studies. Herbarium sheets are often shared
among researchers worldwide, and the specimens of many herbaria have
been digitized to further facilitate their use.