NextGeneration specimen digitization: The international herbarium community goes spectral!

Abstract

1. Spectral reflectance measured from herbarium specimens represents a vast source of plant phenotypic and functional trait data.
2. The potential to capture data from specimens to enhance knowledge of plant function and taxon identification has inspired many laboratories worldwide to initiate next-generation spectral digitization from specimens.
3. Combining these datasets into a coordinated global database would enable prediction of traits from the world’s plants and allow novel, impactful scientific questions to be addressed at global scale. These novel data streams will generate new capacity to model plant traits globally, enabling connection with remote sensing and ecological and biosphere models and to reconstruct their evolutionary history.
4. Coordination is needed to avoid downstream problems in data aggregation due to variation in data standards and technical specifications of the instruments, optical setups, or measurement protocols. The International Herbarium Spectral Digitization (IHerbSpec) working group has initiated a globally collaborative program, outlining the central issues to address in establishing protocols, standards, and best practices, and next steps. This collaborative effort will allow generation of replicable spectral reflectance data from plant specimens housed in herbaria around the world within ongoing digitization programs following community-defined standards and Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) principles.

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