Herbarium specimens as tools to assess the impact of large herbivores on plant species

Abstract

Herbarium specimens can be used to reconstruct spatiotemporal changes in plant morphology caused by environmental pressures. The reliability of herbarium-derived data requires evaluation, because specimen collection is subject to biases. We used herbarium and field data to investigate the impact of large herbivore browsing on the size of a forb. White trillium (Trillium grandiflorum (Michaux) Salisbury) was studied because the impacts of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus Zimmermann) browsing on this species are well-known. A total of 692 herbarium specimens collected in Quebec (Canada) were used to evaluate leaf area. Leaf area values of herbarium specimens were compared with those of modern (2013, 2014) specimens collected in sites either with >8 deer per square kilometre or without deer. Flowering individuals in modern sites with deer had a significantly lower leaf area than herbarium specimens and modern specimens collected in sites without deer. The distribution of white trillium individuals in deer sites was also skewed towards plants with a smaller leaf area. Herbarium specimens may offer unique and inexpensive data, compared with methods traditionally used to assess the impacts of herbivores on plants, such as exclosures or clipping experiments. Unfortunately, this rich data source is seriously jeopardized by the downtrend in specimen collecting.

Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene

“…see figure 1). Physical specimens hold data that are of great interest in global change biology, such as nutrients [13], heavy metals [14] and signatures of pollinator interactions [15 -17], herbivore interactions [6,[18][19][20], disease [21,22] and physiological processes [23]. In recent years, researchers have increasingly begun to harness digital collections.…”

Developing a Historical Phenology Dataset through Community Involvement for Climate Change Research

“…Unfortunately, small collections are seldom cataloged due to tight budgets, which makes them difficult to access [54]. Another issue facing herbariums is a decrease in addition of new plant specimens [55] [56], which could be contributing to the antiquated reputation of herbariums and their subsequent decrease in funding. The herbariums used in this study were strewn throughout West Virginia in various universities with no central herbarium database or consistent organization.…”

Mining new sources of natural history observations for disease interactions

“…Multiple studies have utilized museum collections to investigate wild plant–pathogen systems (Ristaino et al., ; Li et al., ; Alexander et al., ; Saville et al., ; Andrew et al., ), among other plant ecological interactions (e.g., plant–animal interaction, Beauvais et al., , or phytosociology, Hanan‐A et al., ). There are two types of natural history collections relevant to such disease‐related studies: pathogen‐centered collections that directly target and preserve the disease‐causing organism and broader plant‐centered collections that nonetheless may retain evidence of the disease occurrence and cause.…”

“…Despite the tremendous value of herbarium specimens, depositions of new specimens have substantially declined over the last several decades (Prather et al., ; Lavoie and Lachance, ; Renner and Rockinger, ; Beauvais et al., ; Romberg and Rivera, ), limiting our ability to assess whether historic distributions are impacted by ongoing environmental changes or to find and study extant populations (Applequist et al., ; Meineke et al., 2018a; Lang et al., ). The rise in citizen science platforms, such as iNaturalist (http://www.inaturalist.org), eBird (http://www.ebird.org), or Zooniverse (http://www.zooniverse.org), holds new potential for assessing the ecology of wildlife species.…”