  Herbarium sheets present a unique view of the world's botanical history,
evolution, and diversity. This makes them an all-important data source for
botanical research. With the increased digitisation of herbaria worldwide and
the advances in the fine-grained classification domain that can facilitate
automatic identification of herbarium specimens, there are a lot of
opportunities for supporting research in this field. However, existing datasets
are either too small, or not diverse enough, in terms of represented taxa,
geographic distribution or host institutions. Furthermore, aggregating multiple
datasets is difficult as taxa exist under a multitude of different names and
the taxonomy requires alignment to a common reference. We present the Herbarium
Half-Earth dataset, the largest and most diverse dataset of herbarium specimens
to date for automatic taxon recognition.
