ERC Consolidator Grant · 2025
Botanical Legacies: Towards a New History and Philosophy of Virtual Herbaria
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…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.