Herbarium

Currently, the Herbarium of the University of Pisa (Herbarium Horti Botanici Pisani), preserved in the building at the centre of the Botanic Garden, consists of about 350,000 specimens of dried plants collected since the end of the eighteenth century. It preserves a relevant documentation of the world flora and it is one of the most important Herbarium in Italy for consistency, quality of collections and presence of nomenclatural types.

It is divided into two main sectors: a New Herbarium and a Historical Herbarium including a separate collections section.

The Historical Herbarium is the oldest and most full-bodied nucleus of the Herbarium Horti Botanici Pisani, which was formed at the end of the 18th century and took shape thanks to the collection and exchange work of Gaetano Savi, prefect of the Botanic Garden of Pisa from 1814 to 1843. The original main collection was closed in 1970 for space reasons. This section of the Herbarium hosts the collections of numerous botanists including Gaetano Savi, Giuseppe Raddi, Pietro Savi, Carlo Costa Reghini, Egidio Barsali. The collections after 1970 are kept in a still growing open collection (New Herbarium), which counts about 20,000 specimens.

The most relevant separate collections in the Historical Herbarium include: Herbarium Teodoro Caruel (hosting about 14,500 specimens), Herbarium Giovanni Arcangeli, Herbarium Palmarum, Herbarium Briologico Bottini, Herbarium Briologico Artaria, Herbarium Enrico Cittadella, Herbarium Giovanni Giannini, Herbarium Michele Guadagno (hosting over 35,000 samples), Herbarium Napoleone Passerini, Herbarium Pietro Pellegrini, Herbarium Erminio Ferrarini, Herbarium Crittogamico Italiano. Each collection has its own sorting and cataloguing criteria.

 

Digitization and online consultation

In recent decades, efforts have been made worldwide to digitize the herbarium collections. The Botanic Garden and Museum of the University of Pisa is also making considerable progress in this direction, thanks to the purchase and use of a planetary scanner for the digitization of the specimens and to the adhesion to the international projects JACQ Virtual Herbaria and JSTOR Global Plants.
It is now possible to consult the digitized samples online (www.erbario.unipi.it)  or to use the multimedia stations located in the Botanic Museum, making a virtual visit among the historical collections preserved in our Herbarium accompanied and enriched by a series of additional information such as geographical origin and date of collection.

 

Consult the nomenclature types inserted on JSTOR Global Plants

More details can be found on the page

https://www.ortomuseobot.sma.unipi.it/2018/08/digitalizzazione-dellerbario-delluniversita-di-pisa/

and in the article:

https://www.ortomuseobot.sma.unipi.it/2020/01/erbario-digitale/