(254) Proposal to add a new Recommendation 7A.2 to suggest deposition of holotypes in herbaria, collections or institutions within the native geographical distribution of any new taxon

The Code strongly recommends that material upon which new taxa are based be placed in public collections to enable examination by future generations of researchers (Rec. 7A.1, Turland & al. in Regnum Veg. 159. 2018). National regulations post-Convention on Biological Diversity (https://www.cbd.int/) and Nagoya Protocol often require types of new taxa to be placed in national collections, but recent work has shown that this is far from the case (Nicholson & al. in Plants, People, Planet, in press). National requirements for permission to collect and export material are often silent on any requirement for deposition of types. For example, Brazilian law states that export of collected material is only allowed with a Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) with a registered institution, the consequence being that after 2015 material must be left in a Brazilian institution (Decreto nº 8.772, de 11 de Maio de 2016; https://www2.camara.leg.br/legin/fed/decret/2016/decreto-8772-11-maio-2016-783077-norma-pe.html). The MTA associated with export of biological material in Indonesia specifies that material remains the property of an Indonesian institution (https://jdih.maritim.go.id/en/peraturan-menteri-lingkungan-hidup-dan-kehutanan-no-p2menlhksetjenkum112018-tahun-2018). Nevertheless, permits issued by some nations (in this example Peru, with permit number 084-2012-AG-DGFFS-DGEFFS to Sandra Knapp & al. in 2012) stipulate that all unicate material and holotypes are only allowed to be exported as loans (“Los ejemplos únicos de los grupos taxonómicos colectados y holotipos, sólo podrán ser exportandos en calidad de préstamo”). This effectively requires the describer of a new taxon to deposit the holotype in the country issuing the permit if the type gathering has been collected by that person under the auspices of that particular permit. When a new taxon is described from older material or from material not collected by the describer, it can be difficult to find information about specimens in relevant herbaria. It is also worth recognizing that searching for specimens in herbaria where foreign collectors leave duplicates, sometimes without the resources to mount, file and digitize, can be time consuming and a burden on curators. This should not, however, deter researchers from making the effort to find duplicates deposited in national collections to designate as holotypes (see Aubriot & Knapp in PhytoKeys 198: 182–183. 2022; Knapp in PhytoKeys 209: 65. 2022). There is a fine balance to be struck, but we feel it is important to at least try to place holotype specimens near where taxa natively occur, even when not stipulated by national requirements. To explicitly recommend best practice that is increasingly becoming national legislation, we propose a new Recommendation as follows: “7A.2. Insofar as possible the herbarium, collection, or institution in which the holotype is deposited should be within the native geographical distribution of the taxon.”