To plan for the future, it's sometimes necessary to look to the past. To improve natural history collection and analysis in the future, a team of researchers is looking at collections of plants from as far back as 1812.
A team from The University of New Mexico Biology department and Museum of Southwestern Biology led by National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow Elizabeth Lombardi recently published research examining botanical trends and the importance of future study and improvements.
Synthesizing historical plant collections to identify priorities for future collection efforts and research applications was published in the ecology journal Ecosphere. Lombardi led the project as a postdoctoral researcher. Co-authors were Assistant Professor of Biology Hannah Marx, the former curator of the UNM herbarium who is now at Cornell University, and Harpo Faust, senior collections manager at the herbarium at the Museum of Southwest Biology. An herbarium (plural: herbaria) is a collection of preserved plant specimens and associated data used for scientific study.
This data synthesis project describes botanical collections that have been made over the last approximately 185 years in New Mexico, Lombardi said.
"Specifically, our goal was to identify habitats and plant species that deserve additional research attention, particularly given the rapid, dramatic changes to habitats across the state," Lombardi said. "New Mexico is highly biodiverse, and natural history collections —such as herbaria — are critically important, completely irreplaceable resources with information about biodiversity in recent history, changes occurring today and, if we invest in natural history collections, opportunities to efficiently improve conservation and restoration efforts for the future."
To understand how and where biodiversity is threatened, it is imperative to build historical baselines that accurately characterize the present and past states of biodiversity across environments. Botanical collections provide important ecological, evolutionary, and biogeographic information on the diversity and distributions of plant taxa.
This research characterizes and quantifies trends in botanical collections made from across different abiotic, biotic, and sociopolitical boundaries within the present-day state of New Mexico. Using a biodiversity informatics approach applied toward a regional case study, the researchers identify opportunities for efficiently improving natural history collection coverage and analyses of botanical diversity. Accurate representation of botanical biodiversity, preserved for future generations through vouchered plant specimens deposited in herbaria, depends on collection decisions made now. This work aims to help as researchers prioritize current and future resources in the face of global change.
To demonstrate the usefulness of collections data synthesis and to provide useful information for a botanically diverse region, we analyzed all botanical records for a particular area of interest—the contemporary state of New Mexico (c. 1812).
"There are also some broader issues that might be relevant, and which were certainly part of why I chose to use free, publicly available data and computational resources," Lombardi said. "Natural history research depends on making new collections and curation of specimens, which requires funding. It seems like we're at an inflection point in how historical biodiversity data are valued and used. Recently, Duke University closed their herbarium, which has encouraged public conversations about the future of biodiversity research. The Museum of Southwestern Biology is an esteemed institution with a reputation for research excellence, and the herbarium at MSB is a hub of creative, responsive work."
Lombardi said there have already been projects that address some of the patterns observed in this new analysis. For example, UNM Master's student Bryana Olmeda is improving floristic knowledge of the Brokeoff Mountains in southeastern New Mexico, which is an area that was found to be poorly represented in botanical knowledge.
"This paper was always intended to be a launching point for further research into the exceptionally diverse botany of New Mexico, while also recognizing the expertise and labor of botanists who cared enough to collect, curate and protect plants," she said.
