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A herbarium is a collection of plant specimens preserved for scientific study. There are different ways to preserve plant material. A herbarium may include pressed and dried plants or plant parts, flowers in alcohol (FAA), seeds, wood sections, pollen, microscope slides, silica dried tissues for DNA extraction, digital images of plants or print copies of pressed specimens.
The first herbarium was established in 1570 in Bologna, Italy by Luca Ghini, an Italian physician and botanist who was a Professor of Botany at the University of Bologna. He was thought to be the first to dry plants under pressure and mount them on paper to serve as a lasting record for future studies or reference material. This practice has been used all over the world and the technique was well known by the time of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778).
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Today, there are around 3400 herbaria in over 168 countries. The Index Herbariorum, which is a joint project of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) and The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), comprises a detailed directory of the public herbaria of the world and the staff members associated with them.
Each herbarium in Index Herbariorum is assigned an official acronym that is used as a standard for referring to the institution and its specimens. The acronym JBL refers to Lankester Botanical Garden (from the institution's name in Spanish, Jardín Botánico Lankester).
Type specimens at JBL may be also retrieved through a dedicated page exclusively dealing with the Type Collection.
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