Combining Herbarium Data with Spatial Data: Potential Benefits, New Needs

Herbarium specimens are, potentially, a rich source of information on the past and present distribution of species. For their potential value to be realized, information from the specimen labels must first, if feasible, be georereferenced, and then entered into a database. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) has devised protocols for making available information from all the world's herbaria (and other natural history col- lections). In this paper we demonstrate how such data can be combined with spatial data from other resources to determine the distribution and evaluate the ecological characteristics of different species. The demonstration makes evident that the data in GBIF are, at present, biased, more data being available from Europe and North America than from other parts of the world. To overcome this, every effort must be made to improve the human and financial resources available to herbaria in order to broaden the participation in GBIF.