The Herbarium Pacificum is part of Hawaii's Bishop Museum of Natural History, and it houses one of the world's most important scientific collections of plants from the Pacific Basin. The Herbarium has long served as a research center for tropical botany, and as a repository for the collections of professional and amateur botanists alike. Research based on this collection provides a unique understanding of how plants have evolved on ocean islands isolated by thousands of miles of water, and along island mountain chains, where a diversity of habitat types are compressed along relatively short distances. It is critically important that these collections be curated and made available for research in a timely manner. This gives researchers the most complete basis for their conclusions, and gives collectors the data they need for choosing the most important areas for sampling. Natural history collections such as the Herbarium Pacificum provide unique resources for biological research, and maintaining them is an ongoing priority for the scientific community.
