Professor Charles Davis, Curator of Vascular Plants, discusses the importance of herbaria and our current collaborative project with LVMH Recherche, Parfums Christian Dior with the Harvard Gazette.

“Understanding what species are and where they live remains fundamental to biological knowledge, but in the face of intensifying land use and climatic changes, we’re now using herbarium collections in many new and important ways....

...I’ve been working with herbarium collections for a long time and, fundamentally, their main use has been to store a permanent record of the plant species with which we share the planet and understanding where they live. And that’s still really important. But these collections can now be used in a whole variety of ways that get at a lot of questions related to conservation, genomics, and biochemistry, and many others related to plants of human use."

Read the full article here: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/02/herbarias-use-and-importance-grows-with-climate-change/