With over 380 million specimens worldwide collected by thousands of botanists over the past three centuries, herbaria comprise an enormous, yet largely untapped, ecological dataset ripe for answering basic and applied research questions. These specimens were traditionally collected for use in taxonomic studies, biodiversity documentation, species identification, and as scientific vouchers. Until recently, herbarium specimens were largely unused by ecologists. Recent and ongoing large scale digitization initiatives have made these data more accessible than ever, including georeferenced localities and high resolution images. Further, technological advancements in areas such as image analysis, statistics, chemistry, and genomics have opened new research possibilities to leverage these data. Herbarium specimens can provide data on interspecific and genotypic variation at multiple spatial scales, as well as intraspecific phenotypic shifts (such as tissue chemistry, functional traits, flowering phenology) through time, space, and across environmental gradients. This session will feature emerging uses of herbarium specimens; that is, those that exemplify this next generation of herbarium uses and extend beyond those originally anticipated by plant collectors in past centuries. These talks will highlight potential collection biases (taxonomic, spatial, temporal) and inherent concerns (tissue degradation, contamination) in these data and discuss ways to address these potential biases. This session will bring together ecologists and evolutionary biologists working in diverse topic areas, utilizing herbarium data (label information, images, and/or the physical specimens) in novel ways to answer ecological questions otherwise unanswerable.