Legacy data from natural history collections contain invaluable information about biodiversity in the recent past, providing a baseline for detecting change and forecasting future trends. In the case of plants, specimens have accumulated for hundreds of years in herbaria, and these may be used as the basis for identifying threatened or declining species, guiding future research and monitoring programs, and establishing conservation priorities. For instance, the IUCN Sampled Red List Index for plants was driven in its first iteration almost solely by herbarium specimen data. Data from herbaria are particularly important in poorly MK-0683 explored regions of the tropics, where the lack of continuous field-based botanical research has emphasized the pivotal role of herbaria in documenting plant diversity and species distributions. The interest in herbaria for undertaking conservation biology research has thus grown in recent years, though less than about 2% of the herbarium specimens have been used to answer biogeographical or environmental questions. Establishing baselines is particularly important for those tropical tree species that are exploited commercially and have come under increasing pressure from the global timber trade. Overexploitation has resulted in declining populations of the most valuable timber species and it is one of the foremost causes for the loss and degradation of tropical forests, with utmost negative consequences for the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services. In recent decades, efforts have been made to increase the sustainability of tropical timber exploitation, through for instance the outright ban on or severe restrictions to the trade of endangered species, or the implementation of certification schemes for timber harvested sustainably. These approaches face several problems, however, including uncertainties related to the conservation status of many exploited species due to insufficient knowledge of their distribution, abundance and population trends. Although this type of information has become increasingly available for tropical forests of Central and South America and Asia, data are still very limited for most African forests. Considering that Africa still holds some of the most important tropical forests in the world and that these have been increasingly exploited, information on the conservation status of its timber species is urgently required. Angola is one of the African countries for which basic data on timber tree species are most severely lacking, though the country has a forested area of about 40–60 million hectares largely administered by the government. Deforestation rates in Angola are among the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, which is likely a consequence of wood extraction for firewood and charcoal, slash-and-burn cultivation, urban expansion, and logging. Illegal logging of valuable timber is considered one of the potential causes of forest degradation, but there is no information on the extent of this problem.