From Dormant Collections to Repositories for the Study of Habitat Changes: The Importance of Herbaria in Modern Life Sciences

In recent decades, the advent of new technologies for massive and automatized digitization, together with the availability of new methods for DNA sequencing, strongly increased the interest and relevance of herbarium collections for the study of plant biodiversity and evolution. These new approaches prompted new projects aimed at the creation of a large dataset of molecular and phenological data. This review discusses new challenges and opportunities for herbaria in the context of the numerous national projects that are currently ongoing, prompting the study of herbarium specimens for the understanding of biodiversity loss and habitat shifts as a consequence of climate changes and habitat destruction due to human activities. With regard to this, the National Biodiversity Future Center (active in Italy since 2022) started a large-scale digitization project of the Herbarium Centrale Italicum in Florence (Italy), which is the most important Italian botanical collection, consisting of more than 4 million samples at present.