Perspectives on New Data III

Harnessing herbaria to advance plant phenology research under global change

Data revolution
Changing phenology
New Phytologist 2023 (a Commentary)
Authors

Kai Zhu

Yiluan Song

Published

June 27, 2023

Keywords

global change biology, environmental data science, phenology, herbarium, museum specimen

Paper GitHub

Highlights

  • Park et al., 2023 used a large herbarium dataset to examine the interaction between urbanization and plant reproductive phenology.
  • Herbarium data offer unmatched long-term, global-scale records for studying phenological shifts, proving compelling evidence of climate change impacts.
  • We highlight new methods that are unlocking the potential of herbarium data, including advancements in digitization, machine learning, and crowd-sourcing.
  • We identified open questions that might be answered by herbarium data, on phenological mismatch, functional traits, and evolution.

Digitized herbarium data are an invaluable source for phenological research under global change. Here we show an example of herbarium data for lilac (Syringa spp.), commonly used to study spring phenology.