The Plant Press

From The Plant Press, Vol. 28, No. 3, July 2025.

Abstracts from the speakers of the 22^nd National Botanical Symposium

The 22^nd National Botanical Symposium, “The Future of Collections-Based Plant Science,” was held on 16 May 2025. The invited speakers included botanists, conservation biologists, and scientific curators. Below are the abstracts from the papers that were presented by the invited speakers.

Lúcia G. Lohmann
Missouri Botanical Garden
“Biodiversity and innovation: Bringing herbaria to their full potential”

Herbaria house dried plants, archives, and other botanical materials. As plant species become extinct, herbarium specimens are rapidly becoming the only record of individual species on the planet. Herbarium collections provide irreplaceable documentation of plant life in space and time, enabling studies that are only possible with these carefully preserved specimens. The contributions of herbaria extend far beyond their traditional taxonomic applications; they provide essential infrastructure for diverse scientific inquiries in genomics, climate science, and conservation biology, among others. By supporting cutting-edge research, herbaria have the potential to provide solutions to society's most pressing challenges. Even though herbaria have served as cornerstones of botanical research and education for over a century, they face unprecedented challenges, with their role intersecting broader conversations about resource allocation, research priorities, and institutional relevance. Despite ongoing challenges, herbaria remain at the forefront of modern science, providing unprecedented opportunities in the contemporary research landscape. I review the current state, opportunities, and future potential of herbarium collections, highlighting opportunities for research innovation and what it would take to bring herbaria to their full potential. The future of herbaria is innovative, multi-disciplinary, collaborative, diverse, and bright.

Emily Coffey
Atlanta Botanical Garden
“The crucial role of botanical gardens in plant conservation”

The growing loss of plant biodiversity highlights the critical role of botanical gardens in conservation, research, and education. Beyond their traditional aesthetic purpose, botanical gardens are essential to global plant conservation efforts. They serve as living repositories for rare and endangered species, preserving genetic diversity vital for ecosystem resilience and restoration. By cultivating plants that are rare or extinct in the wild, botanical gardens safeguard genetic resources necessary for ecological restoration and the study of plant biology. These efforts support the development of effective conservation strategies. Additionally, their controlled environments facilitate research on plant growth, reproduction, and responses to environmental changes, offering insights that are difficult to obtain in natural settings. Botanical gardens also play a key role in raising public awareness about biodiversity. Through educational programs and interactive exhibits, they inspire understanding and support for plant conservation while encouraging public involvement in preserving biodiversity. Botanical gardens are more than beautiful landscapes; they are indispensable centers of biodiversity conservation, research, and education. Their contributions to safeguarding species, advancing scientific knowledge, and fostering environmental awareness make them vital in combating global biodiversity loss.

Emily Meineke
University of California Davis
“Herbivory through the ages: Applying paleoecological methods to herbaria to investigate modern global change”

Global anthropogenic change is reshaping biological communities, driving decline of some species and success of others. Tracking how species interactions shift presents significant challenges, particularly for taxa with sparse or no long-term data. Herbarium specimens offer a powerful tool for reconstructing historical ecological dynamics imprinted in preserved plants, such as herbivory, seed set, pollination, and disease. While herbarium specimens have been increasingly used to document changes in species interactions over time, we lack a clear framework to assess the accuracy of the resulting data. This study advances that framework through re-analyses of existing data and a field study that compares abundance and diversity of insect damage on herbarium specimens against expert assessments in the field. Our results show that herbarium specimens provide reliable estimates of the relative strength of herbivory across plant individuals and species, with trends in expert-derived measurements closely aligning with those extracted from the specimens. Historical plant specimens are now poised to provide unprecedented insights into historical ecological processes how they shift in response to environmental change.

Richard Primack (speaker), Natalie Iwanycki Ahlstrand, Matthew W. Austin, Zoe A. Panchen, Christine Römermann, and Abraham J. Miller-Rushing
Boston University
“The promise of digital herbarium specimens in large-scale phenology and climate change research”

The online mobilization of herbaria has made tens of millions of specimens digitally available, revolutionizing investigations of phenology and plant responses to climate change. We will discuss two main themes associated with this growing body of research, and highlight a series of recent publications exemplifying them: (1) investigating phenology at large spatial and temporal scales, including cross-continental comparisons, and in understudied locations, and (2) testing longstanding theories and novel questions in ecology and evolution that were not previously answerable, such as the differing sensitivities of species and phenological stages to a warming climate. We will then explore strengths and limitations of using digitized herbarium specimens in phenology research, including issues of sampling. (Is it always better to have larger sample sizes?); reliability, transferability, and biases (How might biases in specimen collection, sampling intensity, or digitization affect results?); and ethical and social justice considerations (How can access to digitized herbarium specimens be as fair as possible?). This field will see further breakthroughs as herbaria around the globe continue to mobilize and digitally interlink their collections. New developments will likely come from advances in technology and international collaborations and including understudied regions such as the Arctic and the tropics. 

Rebecca Dikow
Yale University
“Connecting the dots: people, data, and natural history collections”

Natural history collections are extraordinarily valuable resources for taxonomy, systematics, and ecological and climate change research. As data-intensive research methods proliferate, the aggregation of billions of digitized records from natural history collections across the world can become input for machine learning models that evaluate broad biological patterns among specimens representing diverse species and their associated metadata at a scale that was previously impossible. These data can also provide the basis for the development of predictive tools and summarization techniques, enabling researchers to forecast biodiversity trends, assess conservation statuses, and conduct climate change impact assessments. A less commonly reported importance of collections is their significance recording in the scientific process and evidence of science as a community endeavor. People are involved in every aspect of these collections, as collectors, preparators, identifiers, and species authors. These contributions are not always consistently or accurately identified on specimen labels or in the digitized metadata, however, which impacts downstream analyses. Significant barriers to accurate specimen attribution remain, which disproportionately affect how the contributions of women researchers are recognized. This presentation addresses both strategies for improving data accuracy and consistency as well as the benefits of centering the people in collections-based research.

Acknowledgments

The success of the Symposium was due to the significant time and efforts of the following people:

• Symposium Organizing Committee: Amy Bolton, Eric Calhoun, Joy Columbus, Laurence Dorr, Rose Gulledge, Carl Johnson, Gary Krupnick, Susan Pell, Lisa Philander, Eric Schuettpelz, Warren Wagner, Jun Wen, and Kenneth Wurdack
• Symposium Support: NMNH, USBG, and SG staff, especially Gary Krupnick, Toni Daniels, Rei Hawkins, MaryAnn Apicelli, David Kanner, Tiara Boyd, Nancy Khan, and Sue Lutz
• Symposium Sponsors: United States Botanic Garden, NMNH Department of Botany, Smithsonian Gardens, Smithsonian Botany Cuatrecasas Fund