Abstract
The use of herbarium specimens as vouchers to support ethnobotanical surveys is well established. However, herbaria may be underutilized resources for ethnobotanical research that depends on the analysis of large datasets compiled across multiple sites. Here, we compare two medicinal use datasets, one sourced from published papers and the other from online herbaria to determine whether herbarium and published data are comparable and to what extent herbarium specimens add new data and fill gaps in our knowledge of geographical extent of plant use. Using Brazilian legumes as a case study, we compiled 1400 use reports from 105 publications and 15 Brazilian herbaria. Of the 319 species in 107 genera with cited medicinal uses, 165 (51%) were recorded only in the literature and 55 (17%) only on herbarium labels. Mode of application, plant part used, or therapeutic use was less often documented by herbarium specimen labels (17% with information) than publications (70%). However, medicinal use of 21 of the 128 species known from only one report in the literature was substantiated from independently collected herbarium specimens, and 58 new therapeutic applications, 25 new plant parts, and 16 new modes of application were added for species known from the literature. Thus, when literature reports are few or information-poor, herbarium data can both validate and augment these reports. Herbarium data can also provide insights into the history and geographical extent of use that are not captured in publications.
Highlights
Ethnobotanical research is crucial to understanding relationships between people and their biological environment (Thomas 2003)
Our study shows that the modern (1900–2010) herbarium specimens we surveyed comprise a significant source of data
Of those specimens citing any medicinal use at all, 69% reported the therapeutic application of the species, 49% the mode of application, and 61% the plant part used
Summary
Ethnobotanical research is crucial to understanding relationships between people and their biological environment (Thomas 2003). The most complete survey to assess the frequency of ethnobotanical information in herbarium collections was that of von Reis (1962, 1968) She reported almost 6800 specimens citing medicinal uses among the 2,500,000 specimens of Harvard Herbarium, despite excluding those published or likely to be known already. Since von Reis enumerated the advantages of searching herbaria for novel reports of use, herbarium surveys have become a minor but established source of ethnobotanical data (Bedigian 2004; de la Torre et al 2012; Fantz 1991; Jenks and Kim 2013; Krishna et al 2014; Lampe 1986; Lira and Caballero 2002; Lukhoba et al 2006; McKenna et al 2011; Prakash 2011; Van Andel et al 2014; Vickery 1990; Shinde and Prakash 2015). Studies of historic herbaria have used the annotation on specimens to reveal changes in local names and uses (Van Andel et al 2012—Hermann herbarium) or the changing species composition of pharmacopeia (Birch 2009—Gideon Lincecum Herbarium; De Natale and Pollio 2012—Trotter collection)
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