Digitization of natural collections – the way to immortality

It is even hard to estimate general circumscription of natural history collections. Comprehensive database GRSciColl lists 1,095 collections from 7,522 registered institutions across the world (Schindel et al. 2016). From 1.2 to 3 billions of specimens are suggested to be preserved in those collections (Ariño 2010,Vollmar et al. 2010). If follow another database, Index Herbariorum, 3,095 herbaria are registered for today in the world, and contain about 390 million specimens (Thiers 2019). However even this quite narrow fetch limited by plants is far away from real state of things. In 2019 Index Herbariorum listed for Ukraine only 23 herbaria with about 4 millions of specimens, while more precise investigation from 2011 already declared 59 herbarium collections with more than 4,3 millions of specimens (Shiyan 2011)