Old plant specimens hold the key to understanding Canada’s diverse plant life better than smartphone apps.
Researchers from Canadian universities discovered that herbarium specimens, despite being fewer in number, capture more plant diversity than community science observations from apps like iNaturalist. This finding highlights the untapped potential of digitising Canada’s remaining 7.3 million undigitised herbarium specimens.
Eckert and colleagues studied how well herbarium specimens and iNaturalist observations represent the diversity and distribution of Canada’s plants. They found that herbarium records, though only a third as numerous, better captured the taxonomic, evolutionary, and functional diversity of Canadian plants. Herbarium specimens also more efficiently represented species’ environmental preferences, crucial for predicting how plants might respond to climate change.
The researchers used advanced statistical techniques to compare how well each data type represented plant diversity. They also assessed how increasing data availability might improve our ability to model plant distributions across Canada, which is essential for conservation planning.
Interestingly, the study revealed that digitising Canada’s remaining herbarium specimens could potentially quintuple our ability to model plant distributions accurately. This improvement would require over 27 million additional iNaturalist observations to achieve similar results, highlighting the efficiency of herbarium data.
This research builds on previous work showing the value of natural history collections for understanding biodiversity patterns. It emphasises the importance of investing in the digitisation of existing specimens alongside efforts to gather new observations through community science initiatives.
Eckert, I., Bruneau, A., Metsger, D.A., Joly, S., Dickinson, T.A. & Pollock, L.J. (2024). Herbarium collections remain essential in the age of community science. Nature Communications, 15, 7586. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-51899-1
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