Repositories of biocultural diversity: Toward best practices for empowering ethnobotany in digital herbaria.

As herbaria digitize millions of plant specimens, ethnobotanical information associated with them is becoming increasingly accessible. These biocultural data include plant uses, names, and/or management practices of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs). However, the absence of shared curatorial standards limits accessibility and use by IPLCs and others. We estimated and characterized ethnobotanical data associated with herbarium specimens and provide here key considerations for future work. We identified a proportionally small, yet collectively significant, number of ethnobotanical specimens, and call for coordinating best practices among global herbaria to locate, acknowledge, and responsibly share this information, together with source communities.