The unrealized potential of herbaria in global change biology

Plant and fungal specimens in herbaria are becoming primary resources for investigating how plant phenology and geographic distributions shift with climate change, greatly expanding inferences across spatial, temporal, and phylogenetic dimensions. However, these specimens contain a wealth of additional data—including nutrients, defensive compounds, herbivore damage, disease lesions, and signatures of physiological processes—that capture ecological and evolutionary responses to the Anthropocene but which are less frequently utilized. Here, we outline the diversity of herbarium data, global change topics to which they have been applied, and new hypotheses they could inform. We find that herbarium data have been used extensively to study impacts of climate change and invasive species, but that such data are less commonly used to address other drivers of biodiversity loss, including habitat conversion, pollution, and overexploitation. In addition, we note that fungal specimens are under-exp...

馆藏于标本馆（herbaria）的植物与真菌标本，正成为探究植物物候与地理分布如何随气候变化发生改变的核心资源，极大拓展了相关研究在空间、时间与系统发育维度上的推断范围。然而，此类标本还蕴藏着海量额外数据——包括营养成分、防御性化合物、植食性动物取食痕迹、病斑以及生理过程特征——这些数据能够反映生态与进化过程对人类世（Anthropocene）的响应，但此类数据的利用频率相对较低。本文概述了标本馆数据的多样性、其已被应用的全球变化研究主题，以及可借助其提出的全新研究假说。研究发现，标本馆数据已被广泛用于探究气候变化与外来入侵物种的影响，但针对生物多样性丧失的其他驱动因素——包括生境破坏、污染与过度开发——的相关研究中，该类数据的应用则相对较少。此外，我们注意到真菌标本的开发利用仍有待充分挖掘