Botanical Legacies: Towards a New History and Philosophy of Virtual Herbaria

forthcoming

This project sets the foundation for a more inclusive, theoretically sound, and socially just botany of the 21st century. Herbaria hold ca. 400 million preserved plant specimens worldwide. They are vital repositories of botanical and environmental knowledge. However, chronic underfunding has made much of this knowledge inaccessible. Recent digitization efforts for ‘virtual herbaria’ are believed to change this, as they expand accessibility and trigger new studies in herbarium genomics and AI-driven biodiversity and climate change research. This project argues that while digitization is a welcome development, it alone cannot rejuvenate botany. This is due to several historical, epistemic and conceptual challenges that so-far botany has not addressed. They concern (1) epistemic biases in data inherited from botany’s colonial history, (2) conceptual and epistemic issues about integrating and sharing plant data, and (3) more generally, the lack of a firm theoretical framework for herbaria-driven research that can guide biodiversity efforts with historical awareness and conceptual precision. Through an account of integrated history and philosophy of science, this project will solve these problems by conceptualizing plant specimens in a novel way: as unique ‘knowledge hubs’ in which biological, environmental, historical, and socio-cultural knowledge is deeply entangled. These complex hubs link past injustices to today’s biases in collections, and epistemic and conceptual frameworks to future global goals. To untangle them, the project, first, uncovers past contributions of local and indigenous collectors by following traces of their plants in digital collections, and reveals patterns of epistemic injustice they faced. Second, it resolves epistemic and conceptual issues (e.g. of plant individuality) impacting the use of digital plant knowledge. Lastly, it establishes a philosophy of herbaria that links the history of local plant knowers with the future of big data botany.