Sometimes the most useful ways of getting information from herbarium specimens involves destroying part of them. How can this be balanced with stewardship of collections? Davis and colleagues from Missouri, Kew and New York botanical gardens have published a set of guidelines that balance aims to safeguard plant collections for future generations with contemporary research.
The authors say that fewer than 0.5% of herbarium specimens have been destructively sampled. However, they also point to a sharp increase since 1988, when DNA sequencing started to take off. This, they argue, creates pressure on herbarium resources and staff who both want to make samples available for research but also preserve specimens for the future. They make the following recommendations:
For Herbarium Users:
- Confirm specimen determinations before sampling
- Always consult other available resources before destructively sampling herbarium specimens
- Complement herbarium-based studies with fieldwork
- Ensure that institutional permission to destructively sample specimens is granted
- Prioritize destructive sampling of more recent collections
- Destructively sample only the amount of tissue required for the specific research
- Apply effective and proven methods
- Annotate specimens after sampling
- Make data from destructive sampling publicly available immediately
- Respect, collaborate with, support and appropriately credit herbarium stewards, taxonomic experts and herbaria
For Herbarium Stewards:
- Evaluate individually each request for destructive sampling
- Destructive sampling of bioculturally sensitive plants requires special considerations
- Destructive sampling requests should balance current and future needs
- Treat destructive multiomics samples from collections as loans
- Develop a succession plan for derivative (for example, multiomics) collections from destructive sampling
- Protect against hoarding
- Ensure proper institutional permitting is up to date and available for inspection
- Destructive sampling should coincide with barcoding and specimen digitization
- Maintain thorough records and hold users accountable
- Establish transparent policies for destructive sampling and treat them as living documents
Coming at this from an archaeological background, I’m particularly drawn to the guideline for users, Make data from destructive sampling publicly available immediately, which considers even a 1 year embargo on information exceptional. Given the potential to simply destroy information through lack of publication, this seems crucial for science. I hope the guideline for stewards, Maintain thorough records and hold users accountable, helps enforce this. It might be a problem if the steward and the user are the same person.
Davis, C. C., Sessa, E., Paton, A., Antonelli, A., & Teisher, J. K. 2024. Guidelines for the effective and ethical sampling of herbaria. Nature Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02544-z ($)
ReadCube: https://rdcu.be/dVMNZ
