Italy's Central Herbarium Digitizes 4.2 Million Botanical Specimens

The National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC), Italy's first biodiversity research center, has launched a major project to digitally catalog the Central Italian Herbarium (Erbario Centrale Italiano) at the University of Florence's Natural History Museum, along with related collections. With nearly €7 million in funding, the initiative aims to digitize 4.2 million botanical samples by 2025, including dried plants, labels, and documents, making them accessible via a network linked to European universities. The herbarium, founded in 1842 by Sicilian botanist Filippo Parlatore, is Italy's largest and one of the world's most important, housing over 2 million specimens of seed plants, mosses, ferns, algae, fungi, and lichens, plus hundreds of thousands of unstudied samples. The project, led by the University of Florence and the University of Padua, began with vascular plants (tracheophytes). It supports research in biodiversity, medicine, and climate science, and will also reveal the history of collectors, including Charles Darwin, Elisabetta Fiorini Mazzanti, Silvia Zenari, Jeanne Baret (first woman to circumnavigate the globe), Carl Thunberg, and Fosco Maraini. Italy pioneered botanical science with the first university botanical garden in Pisa (1543) and the first modern herbarium, both initiated by physician Luca Ghini.