what is the utility of herbarium?
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Answer:
Herbarium collections can have great significance and value to science, and have many uses. Herbaria have long been essential for the study of plant taxonomy, the study of geographic distributions, and the stabilizing of nomenclature.
Answer:
A herbarium is a collection of preserved plant or fungal specimens. Many Herbaria were established throughout Europe in the 1600s, during the age of exploration when botanical gardens could no longer keep living collections of all the known species and thus preserving and storing specimens became common practice.
Herbarium collections can have great significance and value to science, and have many uses. Herbaria have long been essential for the study of plant taxonomy, the study of geographic distributions, and the stabilizing of nomenclature. Linnaeus's herbarium, which contains over 4,000 types, now belongs to the Linnean Society in England. Modern scientists continue to develop novel, non-traditional uses for herbarium specimens that extend beyond what the original collectors could have anticipated.
Specimens housed in herbaria may be used to catalogue or identify the flora of an area. A large collection from a single area is used in writing a field guide or manual to aid in the identification of plants that grow there. With more specimens available, the author or the guide will better understand the variability of form in the plants and the natural distribution over which the plants grow.
Herbaria also preserve a historical record of change in vegetation over time. In some cases, plants become extinct in one area or may become extinct altogether. In such cases, specimens preserved in a herbarium can represent the only record of the plant's original distribution. Environmental scientists make use of such data to track changes in climate and human impact.
Herbaria have also proven very useful as source of plant DNA for use in taxonomy and molecular systematics. Even ancient fungaria represent a source for DNA-barcoding of ancient samples.
Many kinds of scientists and naturalists use herbaria to preserve voucher specimens; representative samples of plants used in a particular study to demonstrate precisely the source of their data, or to enable confirmation of identification at a future date.
They may also be a repository of viable seeds for rare species.
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