Eastern Slovakian herbarium collections - their recent status and perspective

Herbarium specimens are an important part of the work of botanists. Herbarium specimens provide original evidence of the occurrence of a given plant species in a specific area at a specific time and provide irreplaceable material that, when properly stored and treated, can last for centuries. In Slovakia, over 30 public herbarium collections were established. In eastern Slovakia, 10 herbaria exist in total, most are museal collections with regional importance and documents the flora of the catchment area within its jurisdiction and one supraregional collection in University of Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice. From these 10 collections, only six are mentioned in Index herbariorum and 7 are active, but not all have its own curator or botanist. The museal collections include Vlastivedné múzeum v Hanušovciach nad Topľou (acronym HNTS) with 5358 herbarium specimens; Krajské múzeum (acronym MPS) in Prešov with 23811 herbarium specimens, these two institutions were merged and today form Krajské múzeum Tripolitana; Šarišské múzeum (acronym SMB) in Bardejov with 6711 herbarium specimens; Vihorlatské múzeum (acronym HUM) in Humenné with 11973 herbarium specimens; Podtatranské múzeum (acronym POP) in Poprad with 6679 herbarium specimens; Banícke múzeum (acronym ROM) in Rožňava with 5320 herbarium specimens; Výskumná stanica, Štátne lesy TANAP (acronym TNP) in Tatranská Lomnica with 34893 herbarium specimens; Múzeum Spiša (acronym SNV) in Spišská Nová Ves with 20597 herbarium specimens and Východoslovenské múzeum (acronym VSM) in Košice with 5300 herbarium specimens. The last and the biggest is Herbarium of Botanical Garden of Pavol Jozef Šafárik University (acronym KO) in Košice which stores over 50.000 herbarium specimens. These collections contain together over 170.000 herbarium specimens including vascular plants, mosses, lichens, fungi and seeds collected mainly in eastern Slovakia and thus represent an important source of data for botanists, ecologists and nature conservation scientists.