Tropical Plant Collections. Legacies from the past? Essential tools for the future? 2017. (Scientia Danica, Series B, Volume 6). illus. 319 p. gr8vo.

This book provides a review of the ideas behind tropical plantcollections, from the renaissance to the 21st century, and it presentsnew vistas into their scientific and practical uses.Why tropical plant collections? Are they not dusty relics from acolonial past in the 19th and early parts of the 20th centuries?Something colonial powers in Europe and North America have gathered inheir greed? Something which we now had better forget about? Well, it istrue that the oldest tropical plant collections were assembled byEuropeans in Asia and South America the 17th and 18th century and noware kept in museums in Europe. Later, however, collections were built inthe topical countries themselves, the first ones in the beginning of the19th century in Kolkata, India, and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Now thereare many collections throughout the tropics, both living and preserved.New institutions are established in the tropics and older ones keepgrowing so that, for example, there are now more collections of Africanplants in Africa than in the rest of the world. These scientificcollections are being built up by collaboration between scientists inthe tropics and their colleagues in the temperate countries.But what are the uses of this world-wide activity, striving to build andpreserve ever more complete plant collections? Traditionally, tropicalplant collections allowed scientists to write manuals of the world'splants, secure that the rare species are known and as far as possiblecan be preserved and serve science as a huge library of informationabout plants. This book demonstrates that both old and new collectionsare also valuable tools for future research, as an archive of 'big data'about distribution, flowering time, temperature relations, as an archiveof natural components of potential use to man and as an archive of DNA,which may bring us hitherto unimagined information.Unfortunately, the past decade has seen dramatic changes in theconditions of and care for collections of tropical plants kept inherbaria and botanical gardens. The collections require staff, housingand maintenance, and now some collections are relegated to warehouses,detached from scientific activities, and sometimes under conditionswhere they can only be consulted with difficulty. The book shows whythis should not be so.