Format: ORAL

Jordan K. Teisher1, Emily A. Humphreys2, Cynthia Hong-Wa3, Cynthia Skema2

1 Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, Missouri, USA 2 Morris Arboretum & Gardens of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA 3 Claude E. Phillips Herbarium, Delaware State University, Dover, Delaware, USA

Massive data resulting from herbarium specimen digitization have started a new era in biodiversity studies, often yielding highly cited publications and stimulating innovations in digitization and biodiversity informatics. A growing recognition of the value of herbarium data for research has, in turn, reinforced funding for digitization of collections. However, digitization grants are temporary and sometimes insufficient for their own goals. In addition, they greatly outweigh and outnumber the (capacity) grants available for collection curation/infrastructure and ongoing botanical collecting, activities also required to maintain the digitized data pipeline. Critically, projects using specimen data often lack any funding support for the herbaria housing those specimens. This situation presents an apparent paradox: herbaria have never been more impactful in terms of contributing specimen data to research, but at the same time, those contributions are increasingly hidden in data download files and burgeoning institutional acronym lists. Such under-acknowledgement exacerbates the long-standing collecting/collections funding crunch. This may be most disadvantageous to smaller or more regionally focused herbaria, where funding needs are most acute. However, we argue that these collections are critical both for geographically equitable access to biodiversity collections and as repositories of specimens representing the spatial and temporal density needed for large-scale analyses. We use data from the Mid-Atlantic Herbarium Consortium (MAHC; https://midatlanticherbaria.org/) of the United States as a case study to examine how plant collecting in this region has contributed to the global data pool. We compare these data to mid-Atlantic specimens available through GBIF to evaluate the uniqueness as well as taxonomic, temporal, and geographic coverage of these specimens. With these analyses, we consider the varying roles of herbaria of different sizes and histories as data sources. We argue for greater support for botanical collecting and the continued support of a diversity of herbarium types to meet our biodiversity research needs.