Sending Specimens Away: How Sharing Supports Global Biodiversity Research

Natural history collections have served as libraries of our world’s biodiversity for centuries. These libraries—holding plants, fungi and insects—are known as herbaria. There are over 3,565 herbaria worldwide and each contain important collections from their respective regions of the world. For instance, Denver Botanic Gardens houses the largest collection of macrofungal specimens from the southern Rocky Mountain region in the entire world. Because of this regional emphasis, scientists from other places who are interested in species we hold request loans of our specimens. Sending a loan is like a library lending you a book for an entire year. Scientists peruse our available online data and request physical specimens to sample and study when the scientific questions require it.

To give you an example of a loan, a few weeks ago the Gardens sent willow specimens to Quebec, Canada for a student who is trying to understand evolutionary relationships among different species of willow trees (Figure 1). If previous scientists hadn’t invested the time to collect willow specimens, that student would have to figure out how to travel across the world to collect samples from plants in the wild. Similarly, several fungal specimens were sent to Spain to elucidate the nature of the pigments in earth tongues (Neolecta sp.) (Figure 2). We also request loans from other institutions. One of our graduate students here at the Gardens has requested Jacob’s Ladder (Polemonium sp.) from over 10 other herbaria to study the volatile compounds produced by the plant. These are just a few examples of the more than 30 active loans our Natural History Collections are facilitating (Figure 3).

Herbaria are constantly utilized for their regional collections and frequently send specimens off to curious researchers. Even in our digital age, where data is readily available online, some scientific questions can only be answered by sampling and studying the actual plant or mushroom specimen. Lending our specimens out is one of many ways the Gardens is contributing to science aimed at answering our burning questions about biodiversity on a global scale.

This article was contributed by Collection's Assistant Matthew Sheik.