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 botanists 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 September 2024, 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 spring 2025. We have since digitised and imaged the world Gymnosperm and Fern collections and are now part way through the world Angiosperm collections. Our data are now stored in a BRAHMs database and are available online via the DigiHerb Portal and data aggregators including GBIF.

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

The project has also funded a complete renovation of our 1920s herbarium, which was completed in September 2026. Through installing modern compactor cabinets, we were able to increase the quantity and quality of our storage and bring the entire herbarium collection into controlled conditions. The herbarium and library have been reorganised and catalogued in line with modern standards, and are now a safe and accessible place to work, with dedicated space for students, digitisation, herbarium curation, and taxonomic work.

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

Door to digitising room standing open, with a staff member visible inside it