XVI International Botanical Congess

The main reason scientists collect plants or fungi is to compare and identify species for morphology-based taxonomic studies, for teaching purposes, or to document the distribution and ecology of a given species. The specimens, however, provide much additional and often unforeseeable information. By help of modern modern techniques some of this information is becoming accessible for botanists as well as for scientists working in fields outside of botany. They use herbaria chiefly as temporal archives to document changes in the environment in a certain period of time in the past. The importance of this documentation is that it allows us to foresee developments in the future and, if necessary, to have an influence over those developments. A literature study showed that changes in the genome, in the climate, in the CO2 and nutrient levels of the biosphere, in the accumulation rate of radioactive substances or heavy metals, etc. have already been documented by help of herbarium specimens. The poster gives an overview over some of those studies.