Neus Nualart

Assessing the Relevance of Herbarium Collections as Tools for Conservation Biology

Herbarium collections constitute permanent and often well-documented records of the distribution of taxa through space and time. Since their creation, their uses have dramatically expanded and with many new uses being proposed, including some for which herbaria were not initially intended for. In this paper we assess the potential of these collections on conservation biology, by providing exemplary studies that use herbarium specimens, grouped into four categories: (1) based on occurrence data, such as studies about plant extinction or introduction, or those focused on modelling their ecological niche; (2) based on the specimens themselves, such as morphological or phenological studies to evaluate the impact of climate change; (3) based in genetic data, such as phylogeographic or taxonomical studies; and (4), other applied studies.

Typification of names of plants described by Carlos Pau from Morocco (1908–1922)

We also acknowledge the support of the Generalitat de Catalunya, government of Catalonia (“Ajuts a grups de recerca consolidats”, 2014SGR514).

Dataset of herbarium specimens of threatened vascular plants in Catalonia

Abstract This data paper describes a specimens’ dataset of the Catalonian threatened vascular plants conserved in five public Catalonian herbaria (BC, BCN, HGI, HBIL and MTTE). Catalonia is an administrative region of Spain that includes large autochthon plants diversity and 199 taxa with IUCN threatened categories (EX, EW, RE, CR, EN and VU). This dataset includes 1,618 records collected from 17th century to nowadays. For each specimen, the species name, locality indication, collection date, collector, ecology and revision label are recorded. More than 94% of the taxa are represented in the herbaria, which evidence the paper of the botanical collections as an essential source of occurrence data.