Help your local herbarium!

Volunteers mounting specimens at Univ Leicester
Image: L. Marsh

Regular readers of this blog will know that we have a passion for herbaria. If you don't know much about these collections of dried, pressed plants or why they are so useful, check out our Herbaria page where you'll find resources, videos and contact details to help you find - and maybe visit? - your local herbarium. They are incredibly important for all plant-lovers, whether you're carrying out research, interested in the history of plant collecting, or you're trying to improve your botanical skills and really want to get to grips with what a particular species looks like across the year and in all kinds of conditions. 

Ranee putting away specimens
 in the NHM Herbarium
Image courtesy of S. Knapp 

So when Sandy Knapp, Chair of BSBI's Board of Trustees and botanist at the Natural History Museum, London, got in touch with important information about how we can help our herbaria, we were keen to help spread the word!

Over to Sandy to tell us more:

"As botanists we all love to see plants in the field, there is nothing like it. But herbaria are essential resources for verification of occurrences, especially when taxonomic opinions change. David Pearman showed how important herbaria are for finding first records of alien species in our area and emphasised the key role small, local herbaria play in understanding our flora.

Herbaria of the world are recorded in the online resource Index Herbariorum maintained by the New York Botanical Garden. Here you can look up herbaria by country or acronym (all registered herbaria have a standard acronym – for example mine at the Natural History Museum is BM (from when we were the British Museum!) and Trinity College herbarium is TCD and so on). There has been increasing interest in digitising and providing online images of herbarium specimens – for example, Kew has embarked on a programme to digitally image the entire herbarium.

Digitising herbarium specimens
Image courtesy of S. Knapp

But it is not only the big collections that are important for understanding our British and Irish flora! Right now, in the UK we have a great opportunity, especially for small institutions. Sadly, Ireland is not a part of this local initiative, but future initiatives await (and there is a Europe-wide DiSSCo consortium from which the UK node sprang).

DiSSCo UK (Distributed System of Scientific Collections UK) is a national programme to digitally record  the UK’s natural history collections – herbaria included. DiSSCo UK seeks to become a one-stop, dynamic, openly available and easy-to-use e-science infrastructure, integrating digital access to UK natural science collections. Through a hub and spoke model of digitisation at national, regional and local levels DiSSCo will:

• Empower the UK network of collections through digitisation
• Enhance UK biodiversity and heritage information infrastructure
• Improve data quality
• Deliver relevant data

Folders full of herbarium specimens
Image courtesy of S. Knapp

The 10-year programme has been allocated funding from the UK government, and herbaria are among the first collections to be digitised – so the fun and benefit from having access to digital records of herbarium specimens will soon begin!

An Expression of Interest (EOI) for DiSSCo UK has been launched for organisations interested in participating in future DiSSCo UK digitisation funding calls and wider activities over the 10-year programme. We’d encourage all organisations with an interest in DiSSCo UK to participate, and the EOI will aid in connecting organisations with potential hubs to collaborate on funding calls

Prof Clive Stace in the Univ Leicester Herbarium
Image: L. Marsh

The EOI is a light touch process that should not require special preparation or research – completion time will depend on which questions are relevant to the submitting organisation but is estimated at 20-40 minutes. Submissions are via Citizen Space, an online survey platform. The survey can be found here. The closing date for submissions is Friday 21st March.

If you have any questions, please direct them to dissco-uk@nhm.ac.uk. If you encounter any difficulty using Citizen Space, please direct your query to infrastructure@ahrc.ukri.org. Our BSBI President, Paul Ashton, has registered his local herbarium’s interest – I encourage all BSBI members to contact their local collections and urge them to do the same!"

Many thanks to Sandy for sharing this important news. We'll be following developments as they unfold, so watch this space, and Sandy will be keeping BSBI members in the loop with a longer piece about DiSSCo and its role in helping herbaria in the autumn issue of BSBI News, our membership magazine. Let's get involved and show some love to our wonderful herbaria!