History and Importance of the Fern Herbarium Collections in Japan, With Focus on the University of Tokyo Herbarium

• Published in: Biodiversity Information Science and Standards 2024-10, Vol.8, p.1059
• Main Authors: Tavares Vasques, Diego, Ebihara, Atsushi, Takano, Atsuko, Ikeda, Hiroshi, Kawakita, Atsushi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Angiosperms; Biodiversity; Biogeography; Digitization; Ferns; Flowers & plants; Isotypes; Medicinal plants; Museums; Natural history; Taxonomy
• ISSN: 2535-0897; 2535-0897
• DOI: 10.3897/biss.8.138439

HERBARIUM PLANT SPECIMENS AND THEIR HERBARIUM HOLDINGS Natural history collections around the globe represent a dormant source of taxonomic and biogeographic information, as it is estimated that one to three billion specimens are included in such collections (Soberon 1999; Ariño 2010). In the case of botanical collections, the worldwide distribution of specimens across herbaria is often uneven and biased by colonialism, with most specimens housed in the global North, and in many cases resulting in a reverse latitudinal relationship between plant diversity present in nature and the location of the herbaria housing it (Park et al. 2023). As an example, Yong (2013) reviewed holdings of common and type specimens and concluded that the type specimens’ accumulation in China is less than the world average. The number of type specimens is an important reflection of botanical accumulation in a country, and the number of specimens and their origins are therefore very important in a globalized framework. Accordingly, efforts to catalogue and digitize collections, and to make them globally accessible, are important tasks for herbaria. HERBARIA IN JAPAN AND THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO (TI) HERBARIUM In Japan, 74 herbaria are registered in Index Herbariorum (Thiers 2024), accounting for more than 13 million plant specimens. Herbaria in Japan date from the 19th century, with the first herbarium founded in Japan being the University of Tokyo’s (TI) herbarium (Herbarium of the University of Tokyo 2021) established in 1877. The herbarium holds a collection of more than 1,800,000 specimens of vascular plants, corresponding to ca. 14% of the total botanical collection of Japan. Although there is no complete survey of the number of specimens in the collection, it is estimated that the TI herbarium holds 20,000 type specimens, corresponding to 1% of the total number in the collection. Within the type specimens, only a fraction of the collection is digitized and available online, including 3,793 type specimens of angiosperms (and 1,743+ type specimens from other groups newly photographed in the last year). Regarding the ferns and lycophytes, the TI herbarium holds 35 families, including more than 300,000 specimens, comprising 1068+ type specimens (with 321 confirmed holotypes, 127 isotypes, and 510 syntypes), which are now being databased. The TI herbarium fern and lycophyte type collection includes plants from Japan, and important collections from Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, and many