During the past years an increasing number of studies have focussed on the use of herbarium specimens for molecular phylogenetic investigations and several comparative studies have been published. However, in the studies reported so far usually rather large amounts of material (typically around 100 mg) were sampled for DNA extraction. This equals an amount roughly equivalent to 8 cm(2) of a med...

Plants kept as dried herbarium specimens share many characteristics with their living counterparts, but there are some substantial differences between them. Due to dehydration, leaves of herbarium specimens change not only their mass and colour, but in many cases change their dimensions, too. The present study aimed to determine whether leaf shape changes during the drying process. A total of 7...

*Understanding disease distributions is of fundamental and applied importance, yet few studies benefit from integrating broad sampling with ecological and phylogenetic data. Here, anther-smut disease, caused by the fungus Microbotryum, was assessed using herbarium specimens of Silene and allied genera of the Caryophyllaceae. *A total of 42,000 herbarium specimens were examined, and plant geogra...

To date, phenological research has provided evidence that climate warming is impacting both animals and plants, evidenced by the altered timing of phenophases. Much of the evidence supporting these findings has been provided by analysis of historic records and present-day fieldwork; herbaria have been identified recently as an alternative source of phenological data. Here, we used Rubus specime...

IN RECENT YEARS collections made by staff members of the Fiji Department of Agriculture have substantially added to the available study material of Fijian plants, permitting more adequate knowledge of many species and the recognition of others as new to science. Study of the Rubiaceae of these collections has made desirable the publication of notes to clarify certain complexes within the genus ...

Kees Bas, born in Rotterdam, graduated in Biology at Leiden University in 1954, and started his life-long career at the National Herbarium of the Netherlands, University Leiden branch (then Rijksherbarium/Hortus Botanicus) in 1953 as curator for the fungi, in particular of the Agaricales. In the first period of his career he played a leading role, together with his colleague Rudi Maas Geesteran...

The development of a universal approach to the identification of fungi from the environment is impeded by the limited number and narrow phylogenetic range of the named internal transcribed spacer DNA sequences available on GenBank. The goal here was to assess the potential impact of systematic DNA sequencing from a fungal herbarium collection. DNA sequences were generated from a diverse set of ...