As primary producers of biomass, higher plants and algae are important components of global biodiversity and are fundamental to marine and terrestrial ecosystems. They are also the basis for human well-being, providing food, materials and medicines. Specimens of these organisms are placed in herbaria, where they are commonly referred to as botanical specimens. Herbaria, like other natural history collections, are the foundational resources for taxonomy and the study of biodiversity. A herbarium is a primary data source of dried and labeled plant specimens that is arranged to allow for easy retrieval access and archival storage. A herbarium is like a library, but differs in that the information is stored in a biological form like dried, and annotated plant specimens. Herbaria play a pivotal role because each collected and preserved specimen represents a verifiable record of the presence of a species in a defined place at a specific time.

Herbariums in the form of dried plants were first created in Europe in the 16th century. The first such herbarium of dried specimens was made in 1544 by the Italian physician and botanist Luca Ghini from Bologna. The oldest herbarium collections in the world that have survived to this day include: the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, founded in 1545, the Botanical Garden in Bologna, founded in 1568, and the Dutch Botanical Garden in Leiden, founded in 1590. According to the information provided in publication Thomas Borsch et al. (A complete digitization of German herbaria is possible, sensible and should be started now. Research Ideas and Outcomes 6: e50675, 2020) in Europe there are less than 700 larger herbaria with 176 million dried specimens. There are 32 herbaria in Poland, with approximately 5.3 million specimens in their collections obtained mainly from terrestrial ecosystems.

The Macroalgae Herbarium Consortium is a recommendable project of scanned sheets of marine, estuarine and freshwater macroalgae – https://www.macroalgae.org/portal/. The goal of the Macroalgal Digitization Project is to image, georeference and database herbarium sheets of macroalgae specimens stored in 49 herbaria in USA from New England to Florida, to Hawaii and Guam.