The French Muséum national d’histoire naturelle vascular plant herbarium collection dataset

Gwenaël Le Bras, Marc Pignal, Marc L. Jeanson, Serge Muller, Cécile Aupic, Benoît Carré, Grégoire Flament, Myriam Gaudeul, Claudia Gonçalves, Vanessa R. Invernón, Florian Jabbour, Elodie Lerat, Porter P. Lowry, Bérangère Offroy, Eva Pérez Pimparé, Odile Poncy, Germinal Rouhan, Thomas Haevermans

We provide a quantitative description of the French national herbarium vascular plants collection dataset. Held at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris, it currently comprises records for 5,400,000 specimens, representing 90% of the estimated total of specimens. Ninety nine percent of the specimen entries are linked to one or more images and 16% have field-collecting information available. This major botanical collection represents the results of over three centuries of exploration and study. The sources of the collection are global, with a strong representation for France, including overseas territories, and former French colonies. The compilation of this dataset was made possible through numerous national and international projects, the most important of which was linked to the renovation of the herbarium building. The vascular plant collection is actively expanding today, hence the continuous growth exhibited by the dataset, which can be fully accessed through the GBIF portal or the MNHN database portal (available at: https://science.mnhn.fr/institution/mnhn/collection/p/item/search/form). This dataset is a major source of data for systematics, global plants macroecological studies or conservation assessments.