Abstract:

Herbaria are dried pressed plant specimens and their associated collections data, ancillary collections (e.g., photographs) and library materials are remarkable and irreplaceable sources of information about plants and the world they inhabit. They provide the comparative material that is essential for studies in taxonomy, systematics, ecology, anatomy, morphology, conservation biology, biodiversity, ethnobotany, and paleobiology, as well as being used for teaching and by the general public. They are a veritable ‘gold mine’ of information and the foundation of comparative biology. However, whereas many specimens in herbaria have aesthetic qualities and appear interesting in their own right; many do not have these qualities since they are snapshots in time of specimens captured at the time of their collection, and the students’ experience with herbaria underwhelming. Some specimens may be wholly vegetative and in time many flowers deteriorate, losing their colour or being consumed by pests, or damaged through poor handling - teaching herbaria are typically not treated with poison and are handled more than research herbaria. One solution to the loss of information or lack of interpretation is augmented reality (AR). A selection of herbarium sheets from the Dublin City University Herbarium (official acronym: HUUD) was fitted with encoded stickers which allowed access to photographs of the plant showing living detail and other settings such as photographs of the place at the time the specimen was collected - data, in fact, important to herbaria but often stored elsewhere. Students were probed for their impressions of the AR-enhanced herbarium sheets over those without, across a selection of sheets with a range of difficulty of interpretation. Such a technological solution has then the dual role of providing an educational aspect and enhancing the integration of the herbarium itself. The results indicated that using AR technology may have the potential to enhance students’ learning outcomes at the analyzing level and their learning attitudes toward plant biology. Students were able to select the correct family for inclusion into plant family folders better with AR than without AR.

Keywords:

Augmented reality, herbarium, AR-enhanced herbarium.