Transforming Trinity’s Herbarium

In 2023, under Curator Dr Peter Moonlight, Assistant Curator Prof. Trevor Hodkinson, and Chair of Botany Prof. Jennifer McElwain, the herbarium received a significant funding award from the National Parks and Wildlife Service for the project Transforming Trinity’s Herbarium. This award has funded the herbarium to fully digitise its collections and allowed us to update the herbarium storage to allow us to safeguard the collections for the future.

Pictured from left to right are Jennifer McElwain, Professor of Botany in Trinity's School of Natural Sciences, Malcolm Noonan, Minister of State for Heritage & Electoral Reform, Provost Linda Doyle, and Ciara Carberry, Director of Nature Conservation at the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

Natural History collections like those of Trinity College Dublin Herbarium represent an irreplaceable source of data on the diversity and distributions of plants from Ireland’s recent past. In addition, our global collections represent a significant part of Ireland’s contribution to our understanding of global diversity patterns. These collections are testament to the efforts of Irish men and women, and their collaborators, to fully document the world’s biodiversity. To reach their full potential, it is imperative that these collections are databased and imaged, and these images and data are available to the global research community.

In early 2023, Trinity College Dublin Herbarium installed a state-of-the-art digitisation and imaging suite. We began by digitising and imaging the British and Irish vascular plant collections, which we completed in early 2025. Our data are now stored in a BRAHMs database and will be available online by the end of 2025. We are now working to complete the imaging and digitising our world herbarium collections by 2030.

For more information on the digitisation of our herbarium, please contact our digitisation coordinator Madison Windsor.

In parallel, we are working to renovate our 1920s herbarium and increase the quantity and quantity of storage for herbarium specimens. This will allow us to bring the entire herbarium collection into controlled conditions by the end of 2025 and for the first time since the 1980s. The redesigned herbarium will also be a safe and accessible place to work, with dedicated space for digitisation, herbarium curation, and taxonomic work.

For further information on our herbarium restoration, please contact our restoration coordinator Saoirse Hetherington.

The staff of Trinity College Dublin Herbarium would like to thank the National Parks and Wildlife Service for their continued support.