The colonial legacy of herbaria

Herbarium collections shape our understanding of the world's flora and are crucial for addressing global change and biodiversity conservation. The formation of such natural history collections, however, are not free from sociopolitical issues of immediate relevance. Despite increasing efforts addressing issues of representation and colonialism in natural history collections, herbaria have received comparatively less attention. While it has been noted that the majority of plant specimens are housed in the global North, the extent of this disparity has not been rigorously quantified to date. Here, by analyzing over 85 million specimen records and surveying herbaria across the globe, we assess the colonial legacy of botanical collections and how we may move towards a more inclusive future. We demonstrate that colonial exploitation has contributed to an inverse relationship between where plant biodiversity exists in nature and where it is housed in herbaria. Such disparities persist in herbaria across physical and digital realms despite overt colonialism having ended over half a century ago, suggesting ongoing digitization and decolonization efforts have yet to alleviate colonial-era discrepancies. We emphasize the need for acknowledging the inconvenient history of herbarium collections and the implementation of a more equitable, global paradigm for their collection, curation, and use.

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Correspondence between Adolphe Brongniart and Robert Schomburgk: trading natural history collections for honours

Archives of Natural History ◽

10.3366/anh.2002.29.3.333 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 29 (3) ◽

pp. 333-336

Author(s):

PIOTR DASZKIEWICZ ◽

MICHEL JEGU

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Natural History ◽

Dominican Republic ◽

Southeast Asia ◽

Herbarium Specimens ◽

British Guiana ◽

Natural History Collections ◽

History Of ◽

Source Of Information ◽

German Naturalist

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses some correspondence between Robert Schomburgk (1804–1865) and Adolphe Brongniart (1801–1876). Four letters survive, containing information about the history of Schomburgk's collection of fishes and plants from British Guiana, and his herbarium specimens from Dominican Republic and southeast Asia. A study of these letters has enabled us to confirm that Schomburgk supplied the collection of fishes from Guiana now in the Laboratoire d'Ichtyologie, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. The letters of the German naturalist are an interesting source of information concerning the practice of sale and exchange of natural history collections in the nineteenth century in return for honours.

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Using insect natural history collections to study global change impacts: challenges and opportunities

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences ◽

10.1098/rstb.2017.0405 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 374 (1763) ◽

pp. 20170405 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

Heather M. Kharouba ◽

Jayme M. M. Lewthwaite ◽

Rob Guralnick ◽

Jeremy T. Kerr ◽

Mark Vellend

Keyword(s):

Natural History ◽

Global Change ◽

Global Changes ◽

Genomic Information ◽

Theme Issue ◽

The Past ◽

Natural History Collections ◽

Global Change Research ◽

Challenges And Opportunities

Over the past two decades, natural history collections (NHCs) have played an increasingly prominent role in global change research, but they have still greater potential, especially for the most diverse group of animals on Earth: insects. Here, we review the role of NHCs in advancing our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary responses of insects to recent global changes. Insect NHCs have helped document changes in insects' geographical distributions, phenology, phenotypic and genotypic traits over time periods up to a century. Recent work demonstrates the enormous potential of NHCs data for examining insect responses at multiple temporal, spatial and phylogenetic scales. Moving forward, insect NHCs offer unique opportunities to examine the morphological, chemical and genomic information in each specimen, thus advancing our understanding of the processes underlying species’ ecological and evolutionary responses to rapid, widespread global changes. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the anthropocene’.

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Tracking changes in natural history collections utilization: A case study at the Museum of Southwestern Biology at the University of New Mexico

Collection Forum ◽

10.14351/0831-4985-29.1.1 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 29 (1-2) ◽

pp. 1-21 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Bethany L. Abrahamson

Keyword(s):

Natural History ◽

University Of New Mexico ◽

Research Fields ◽

Fields Of Study ◽

Natural History Collections ◽

History Of ◽

Data Source ◽

History Of Use ◽

The University

AbstractNatural history collections (NHCs) are used in many fields of study, but general knowledge regarding their uses is poor. Because of this, funding and support for NHCs frequently fluctuate. One way in which collections professionals can illustrate a collection’s contribution to a variety of fields is based on the collection’s history of use. Tracking NHC utilization through time can increase NHC value to others outside of the collection, allow for the analysis of changes in specimen-based research trends, and assist in effective collection management. This case study focuses on NHC usage records held by the Museum of Southwestern Biology (MSB), a currently growing university collection used in many research fields, and presents methods for quantifying collections utilization through time. Through an exploration of these data, this paper illustrates MSB’s growth and changes in research produced over time and offers explanations for the changes observed. Last, this study provides suggestions for how collections professionals can most greatly benefit from considering NHC records as a data source. Understanding NHC usage from “the collection’s perspective” provides a new way for NHC professionals to understand NHCs’ value in the context of the research it supports and demonstrates the importance of this key infrastructure to a broader audience.

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Resources for the History of Science in the Libraries of the British Museum (Natural History)

The British Journal for the History of Science ◽

10.1017/s0007087400024407 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

pp. 91-97 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

R. E. R. Banks

Keyword(s):

Natural History ◽

History Of Science ◽

British Museum ◽

Human Biology ◽

Blue Whale ◽

The Public ◽

Natural History Collections ◽

History Of

Alfred Waterhouse's ornate Romanesque building at South Kensington, London, has contained the natural history collections of the British Museum since 1881. First opened to the public on Easter Monday, 18 April, in that year, the British Museum (Natural History) (BM(NH)) has become well-known for the excellence of its exhibition galleries, particularly for its dinosaurs, blue whale, and, more recently, for its revolutionary Hall of Human Biology.

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When commerce, science, and leisure collaborated: the nineteenth-century global trade boom in natural history collections

Journal of Global History ◽

10.1017/s1740022817000171 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 319-339 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Anne Coote ◽

Alison Haynes ◽

Jude Philp ◽

Simon Ville

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Natural History ◽

Global Trade ◽

Global History ◽

Remote Areas ◽

Business Logistics ◽

Natural History Collections ◽

The Face ◽

History Of

AbstractNatural history products formed an important, but little studied, component of the globalization of trade in the mid nineteenth century. The trade, specifically in zoology, occurred in the face of considerable challenges. It penetrated some of the more remote areas of the globe; its products were heterogeneous and difficult to price; and exchange occurred among scientists, commercial traders, and collectors, each of whom had their own particular practices and mores. This article charts the dimensions of this trade and offers explanations about the ways in which its complexities were addressed through major developments in taxidermy, taxonomy, transport and business logistics, alternative forms of exchange, and trust-based networks. More broadly, our work speaks to current developments in global history, imperial networks, and the history of scientific collecting.

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Digitization and the Future of Natural History Collections

BioScience ◽

10.1093/biosci/biz163 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 70 (3) ◽

pp. 243-251 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Brandon P Hedrick ◽

J Mason Heberling ◽

Emily K Meineke ◽

Kathryn G Turner ◽

Christopher J Grassa ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Natural History ◽

Global Change ◽

Large Scale ◽

Anthropogenic Impacts ◽

Digital Content ◽

Global Community ◽

New Approaches ◽

Natural History Collections ◽

Data Links ◽

Critical Issues

Abstract Natural history collections (NHCs) are the foundation of historical baselines for assessing anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. Along these lines, the online mobilization of specimens via digitization—the conversion of specimen data into accessible digital content—has greatly expanded the use of NHC collections across a diversity of disciplines. We broaden the current vision of digitization (Digitization 1.0)—whereby specimens are digitized within NHCs—to include new approaches that rely on digitized products rather than the physical specimen (Digitization 2.0). Digitization 2.0 builds on the data, workflows, and infrastructure produced by Digitization 1.0 to create digital-only workflows that facilitate digitization, curation, and data links, thus returning value to physical specimens by creating new layers of annotation, empowering a global community, and developing automated approaches to advance biodiversity discovery and conservation. These efforts will transform large-scale biodiversity assessments to address fundamental questions including those pertaining to critical issues of global change.

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Digitization and the future of natural history collections

10.7287/peerj.preprints.27859 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Brandon Hedrick ◽

Mason Heberling ◽

Emily Meineke ◽

Kathryn Turner ◽

Christopher Grassa ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Natural History ◽

Global Change ◽

Large Scale ◽

Anthropogenic Impacts ◽

Digital Content ◽

Global Community ◽

New Approaches ◽

Natural History Collections ◽

The Future ◽

Data Linkages

Natural history collections (NHCs) are the foundation of historical baselines for assessing anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. Along these lines, the online mobilization of specimens via digitization–the conversion of specimen data into accessible digital content–has greatly expanded the use of NHC collections across a diversity of disciplines. We broaden the current vision of digitization (Digitization 1.0)–whereby specimens are digitized within NHCs–to include new approaches that rely on digitized products rather than the physical specimen (Digitization 2.0). Digitization 2.0 builds upon the data, workflows, and infrastructure produced by Digitization 1.0 to create digital-only workflows that facilitate digitization, curation, and data linkages, thus returning value to physical specimens by creating new layers of annotation, empowering a global community, and developing automated approaches to advance biodiversity discovery and conservation. These efforts will transform large-scale biodiversity assessments to address fundamental questions including those pertaining to critical modern issues of global change.

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Use of European Open Science Cloud and National e-Infrastructures for the Long-Term Storage of Digitised Assets from Natural History Collections

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards ◽

10.3897/biss.3.37164 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

Author(s):

Abraham Nieva de la Hidalga ◽

Nicolas Cazenave ◽

Donat Agosti ◽

Zhengzhe Wu ◽

Mathias Dillen ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Natural History ◽

Open Science ◽

Easy Access ◽

Long Term Storage ◽

Natural History Collections ◽

Herbarium Collections ◽

Access Services ◽

Term Storage ◽

Biodiversity Information

Digitisation of Natural History Collections (NHC) has evolved from transcription of specimen catalogues in databases to web portals providing access to data, digital images, and 3D models of specimens. These portals increase global accessibility to specimens and help preserve the physical specimens by reducing their handling. The size of the NHC requires developing high-throughput digitisation workflows, as well as research into novel acquisition systems, image standardisation, curation, preservation, and publishing. Nowadays, herbarium sheet digitisation workflows (and fast digitisation stations) can digitise up to 6,000 specimens per day. Operating those digitisation stations in parallel, can increase the digitisation capacity. The high-resolution images obtained from these specimens, and their volume require substantial bandwidth, and disk space and tapes for storage of original digitised materials, as well as availability of computational processing resources for generating derivatives, information extraction, and publishing. While large institutions have dedicated digitisation teams that manage the whole workflow from acquisition to publishing, other institutions cannot dedicate resources to support all digitisation activities, in particular long-term storage. National and European e-infrastructures can provide an alternative solution by supporting different parts of the digitisation workflows. In the context of the Innovation and consolidation for large scale digitisation of natural heritage (ICEDIG Project 2018), three different e-infrastructures providing long-term storage have been analysed through three pilot studies: EUDAT-CINES, Zenodo, and National Infrastructures. The EUDAT-CINES pilot centred on transferring large digitised herbarium collections from the National Museum of Natural History France (MNHN) to the storage infrastructure provided by the Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur (CINES 2014), a European trusted digital repository. The upload, processing, and access services are supported by a combination of services provided by the European Collaborative Data Infrastructure (EUDAT CDI 2019) and CINES . The Zenodo pilot included the upload of herbarium collections from Meise Botanic Garden (APM) and other European herbaria into the Zenodo repository (Zenodo 2019). The upload, processing and access services are supported by Zenodo services, accessed by APM. The National Infrastructures pilot facilitated the upload of digital assets derived from specimens of herbarium and entomology collections held at the Finnish Museum of Natural History (LUOMUS) into the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility (FinBIF 2019). This pilot concentrates on simplifying the integration of digitisation facilities to Finnish national e-infrastructures, using services developed by LUOMUS to access FinBIF resources. The data models employed in the pilots allow defining data schemas according to the types of collection and specimen images stored. For EUDAT-CINES, data were composed of the specimen data and its business metadata (those the institution making the deposit, in this case MNHN, considers relevant for the data objects being stored), enhanced by archiving metadata, added during the archiving process (institution, licensing, identifiers, project, archiving date, etc). EUDAT uses ePIC identifiers (ePIC 2019) to identify each deposit. The Zenodo pilot was designed to allow defining specimen data and metadata supporting indexing and access to resources. Zenodo uses DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) and the underlying data types as the main identifiers for the resources, augmented with fields based on standard TDWG vocabularies. FinBIF compiles Finnish biodiversity information to one single service for open access sharing. In FinBIF, HTTP URI based identifiers are used for all data, which link the specimen data with other information, such as images. The pilot infrastructure design reports describe features, capacities, functions and costs for each model, in three specific contexts are relevant for the implementation of the Distributed Systems of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo 2019) research infrastructure, informing the options for long-term storage and archiving digitised specimen data. The explored options allow preservation of assets and support easy access. In a wider context, the results provide a template for service evaluation in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC 2019) which can guide similar efforts.

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Linking and the Role of the Material Citation

Biodiversity Information Science and Standards ◽

10.3897/biss.5.75543 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 5 ◽

Author(s):

Jeremy Miller ◽

Donat Agosti ◽

Marcus Guidoti ◽

Francisco Andres Rivera Quiroz

Keyword(s):

Natural History ◽

Dna Sequences ◽

Pilot Project ◽

Natural History Collections ◽

Darwin Core ◽

History Of ◽

Related Group ◽

Data Elements ◽

Project Data

Citing the specimens used to describe new species or augment existing taxa is integral to the scholarship of taxonomic and related biodiversity-oriented publications. These so-called material citations (Darwin Core Term MaterialCitation), linked to the natural history collections in which they are archived, are the mechanism by which readers may return to the source material upon which reported observations are based. This is integral to the scientific nature of the project of documenting global biodiversity. Material citation records typically contain such information as the location and date associated with the collection of a specimen, along with other data, and taxonomic identification. Thus, material citations are a key line of evidence for biodiversity informatics, along with other evidence classes such as database records of specimens archived in natural history collections, human observations not linked to specimens, and DNA sequences that may or may not be linked to a specimen. Natural history collections are not completely databased and records of some occurrences are only available as material citations. In other cases, material citations can be linked to the record of the physical specimen in a collections database. Taxonomic treatments, sections of publications documenting the features or distribution of a related group of organisms (Catapano 2019), may contain citations of DNA sequences, which can be linked to database records. There is potential for bidirectional linking that could contribute data elements or entire records to collections and DNA databases, based on content found in material citations. We compare material citations data to other major sources of biodiversity records (preserved specimens, human observations, and material samples). We present pilot project data that reconcile material citations with their database records, and track all material citations across the taxonomic history of a species.

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Boom and Bust

10.1071/9780643097094 ◽

2009 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Keyword(s):

Natural History ◽

Global Change ◽

21St Century ◽

Environmental Variability ◽

Field Work ◽

Earth System ◽

Boom And Bust ◽

History Of ◽

Industrial Revolutions ◽

Cultural Concept

In Boom and Bust, the authors draw on the natural history of Australia's charismatic birds to explore the relations between fauna, people and environment in a continent where variability is 'normal' and rainfall patterns not always seasonal. They consider changing ideas about deserts and how these have helped us understand birds and their behaviour in this driest of continents. The book describes the responses of animals and plants to environmental variability and stress. It is also a cultural concept, when it is used to capture the patterns of change wrought by humans in Australia, where landscapes began to become cultural about 55,000 years ago as ecosystems responded to Aboriginal management. In 1788, the British settlement brought, almost simultaneously, both agricultural and industrial revolutions to a land previously managed by fire for hunting. How have birds responded to this second dramatic invasion? Boom and Bust is also a tool for understanding global change. How can Australians in the 21st century better understand how to continue to live in this land as its conditions are still dynamically unfolding in response to the major anthropogenic changes to the whole Earth system? This interdisciplinary collection is written in a straightforward and accessible style. Many of the writers are practising field specialists, and have woven their personal field work into the stories they tell about the birds.

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