Question

Bring out the significance of herbarium.

Answer 1

Significance of herbarium can be listed as follows.

(i) Herbarium is a source of knowledge about the flora of a region or a locality or a country.
(ii) It is a data source in which the information on plants are available.
(iii) The type specimens help in the correct identification of plants.
(iv) It provides materials for taxonomic and anatomical studies.
(v) Typical pollen characters have been well emphasized in taxonomy. Morphological characters of the pollen remain unaltered even after storage upto nearly 200 years.
(vi) It is very much useful in the study of cytology, structure of DNA, numerical taxonomy, chaemotaxonomy etc. It acts as a reservoir of gene pool studies.