ArticleNature communications2024
Herbarium collections remain essential in the age of community science.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- The utility of herbarium collections for genetic monitoring.Bioscience · 2026Review
- Harnessing the benefits of herbarium specimen digitisation for inferring recent and ongoing plant extinctions.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Using herbarium collections to study genetic responses to global change.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Documenting biodiversity with digital data: comparing and contrasting the efficacy of specimen-based and observation-based approaches.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- The promise of digital herbarium specimens in large-scale phenology research.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Integrating Genomics, Collections, and Community Science to Delimit Species Clarifies the Taxonomy of a Variable Monitor Lizard (Varanus tristis).Systematic biology · 2026Article
- DNA Barcoding for Herbarium Specimens of the Red AlgaBiology · 2026Article
- Mapping Biodiversity Through Time and Space: Patterns and Drivers of Fabaceae Collection in Mozambique.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Genomic resources for crop wild relatives are critical for perennial fruit breeding and conservation.American journal of botany · 2025Review
- Delayed flowering phenology of red-flowering plants in response to hummingbird migration.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- A nature tourism and citizen science alliance.Bioscience · 2025Review
- Thirty-five years of floristic collections in southern Tuscany (Italy).Biodiversity data journal · 2025Article
- How new plant species have been discovered in China: collection gaps and preferences over the past century.Frontiers in plant science · 2025Article
- The digitisation workflow of the herbarium of the State Museum of Natural History of the NAS of Ukraine (LWS).Biodiversity data journal · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The past decade has yielded more biodiversity observations from community science than the past century of traditional scientific collection. This rapid influx of data is promising for overcoming critical biodiversity data shortfalls, but we also have vast untapped resources held in undigitized natural history collections. Yet, the ability of these undigitized collections to fill data gaps, especially compared against the constant accumulation of community science data, remains unclear. Here, we compare how well community science (iNaturalist) observations and digitized herbarium specimens represent the diversity, distributions, and modeling needs of vascular plants in Canada. We find that, despite having only a third as many records, herbarium specimens capture more taxonomic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity and more efficiently capture species' environmental niches. As such, the digitization of Canada's 7.3M remaining specimens has the potential to more than quintuple our ability to model biodiversity. In contrast, it would require over 27M more iNaturalist observations to produce similar benefits. Our findings indicate that digitizing Earth's remaining herbarium specimens is likely an efficient, feasible, and potentially critical investment when it comes to improving our ability to predict and protect biodiversity into the future.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.