My team and I are curators of the botanical collections at the Natural History Museum in Florence, which has more than five million plant specimens from Italy and around the world, labelled and preserved in protective cases. About half a million of these specimens belong to our historical collections, which include two of the oldest herbaria in the world, created in the sixteenth century.
One of our main activities is to assist botanists, historians and art historians from all over the world who request our samples for their studies. You can think of a herbarium as a library that deals with plants instead of books. Almost every day we receive requests for consultation. The samples can be examined here in Florence, or sent on loan. In the latter case there are strict rules to follow, because the plants in our collection are considered cultural heritage. We send them to other reputable herbaria in our international network for researchers to study in a controlled environment.
There are some plant specimens that we consider just too precious to send out on loan. These include types: the original specimens that are used to formally describe or define a species for the first time. These specimens are often unique. Digitisation through high-resolution photography makes it possible to access them, although we have only begun creating a digital archive. Of the records, only 90,000 have already been digitised. Of these, 20,000 are types. But thanks to funding from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, over the next three years we will digitise our entire collection, a huge task. Many of the types in our archive are still to be discovered: without the contribution of researchers we may never fully understand the significance of some of our specimens.
There are many stories hidden in the dried plants of a herbarium. One of our historical collections is the Beccari Herbarium, which contains specimens collected in Malaysia by the naturalist and explorer Odoardo Beccari. We now know that his accounts of Borneo were among the sources used by the famous writer Emilio Salgari: despite never leaving Italy, Salgari was able to describe these lands accurately in his Sandokan novels thanks to Beccari’s descriptions of Malaysian customs, traditions, and natural environment.
But most importantly for scientists today, a herbarium acts as an archive of recently or locally extinct species. For example, our collection contains the last samples of plants that once lived in the Tuscany wetlands, now lost to land reclamation. And a significant part of our collection is made up of alien species, which are becoming an increasingly worrying problem: as each specimen is geolocated at the time of collection, we can track the spread of invasive or exotic species. Herbarium specimens can also be used to collect small fragments for DNA analysis, providing new insights into plant taxonomy.
I came to the field with a technical background in agricultural science and a PhD in systematic botany and have been working at the herbarium for more than 30 years. Most of my younger colleagues come from the natural and biological sciences, or from heritage conservation. We are, however, a very small team, so managing this incredible collection is a daily struggle.
