Using herbaria to study global environmental change

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1 Department of Molecular Biology, Research Group for Ancient Genomics and Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, Tübingen, Germany
2 Institute of Evolution and Ecology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.26886v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Ecology, Evolutionary Studies, Plant Science, Climate Change Biology
Keywords
ancient DNA, biological invasions, climate change, habitat change, herbarium, phenology, pollution
Copyright
© 2018 Lang et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Lang PLM, Willems FM, Scheepens JF, Burbano HA, Bossdorf O. 2018. Using herbaria to study global environmental change. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26886v1

Abstract

During the last centuries, humans have transformed global ecosystems. With their temporal dimension, herbaria provide the otherwise scarce long-term data crucial to track ecological and evolutionary changes over these centuries of global change. The sheer size of herbaria, together with their increasing digitization and the possibility of sequencing DNA from the preserved plant material, makes them invaluable resources to understand ecological and evolutionary species responses to global environmental change. Following the chronology of global change, we highlight how herbaria can inform about long-term effects on plants of at least four of the main drivers of global change: pollution, habitat change, climate change, and invasive species. We summarize how herbarium specimens so far have been used in global change research, discuss future opportunities and challenges posed by the nature of these data, and advocate for an intensified use of these 'windows into the past' for global change research and beyond.

Author Comment

This is a preprint version of our review on using herbaria to understand ecological and evolutionary species responses to global environmental change. The review will be submitted for publication in a peer reviewed journal.