The Importance of Herbaria

From Plant Press, Vol. 5, No. 3 from July 2002.

The Louisiana State University just opened a new herbarium building and its collection is now being expanded and improved. The old herbarium was stored in the halls of the Life Sciences building on the LSU campus and the new herbarium occupies part of a floor in the new Life Sciences annex. This regional herbarium of 250,000 now has room to grow to 800,000 and it is firmly established in the middle of research and teaching efforts in the department. The Smithsonian botanical community celebrates this new addition and congratulates those at LSU who have worked so hard to accomplish this task.

In honor of the new herbarium, Lowell Urbatsch and Merrideth Blackwell organized a two-day event. The first day was a symposium featuring several speakers and the second day was a field trip. The program included a talk by Vicki Funk, “The Importance of Herbaria in Biological Investigations.”

During the course of the day several speakers mentioned the importance of herbaria; Funk and Thomas Wendt of the University of Texas compiled lists. These lists have been combined and various drafts were passed around Botany at the Smithsonian to produce the following summary which may help all of us better justify our herbaria. Readers are encouraged to take this list and use it in any way they see fit, however, Funk asks that any additions or comments be sent to her <[email protected]> for incorporation into our list.

 

US National Herbarium

Department of Systematic Biology

National Museum of Natural History

Smithsonian Institution

Herbaria, dried pressed plant specimens and their associated collections data and library materials, are remarkable and irreplaceable sources of information about plants and the world they inhabit. They provide the comparative material that is essential for studies in taxonomy, systematics, ecology, anatomy, morphology, conservation biology, biodiversity, ethnobotany, and paleobiology, as well as being used for teaching and by the public. They are a veritable gold mine of information. There are more than 60 million specimens in 628 herbaria in the USA, and 7 million specimens in 110 herbaria in Canada. Nearly 5 million are held at the US National Herbarium housed at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.

Herbaria can be used to:

1. Discover or confirm the identity of a plant or determine that it is new to science (taxonomy);
2. Document the concepts of the specialists who have studied the specimens in the past (taxonomy);
3. Provide locality data for planning field trips (taxonomy, systematics, teaching);
4. Provide data for floristic studies (taxonomy);
5. Serve as a repository of new collections (taxonomy and systematics);
6. Provide data for revisions and monographs (systematics);
7. Verify Latin plant names (nomenclature);
8. Serve as a secure repository for “type” specimens (taxonomy);
9. Provide infrastructure for obtaining loans, etc., of research material (taxonomy, systematics);
10. Facilitate and promote the exchange of new material among institutions (taxonomy);
11. Allow for the documentation of flowering and fruiting times and juvenile forms of plants (taxonomy, systematics, ecology, phenology);
12. Provide the basis for an illustration of a plant (taxonomy, general publishing);
13. Provide pollen for taxonomic, systematic, and pollination studies as well as allergy studies (taxonomy, systematics, pollination ecology, insect ecology, medical studies);
14. Provide samples for the identification of plants eaten by animals (animal ecology);
15. Document which plants grew where through time (invasive species, climate change, habitat destruction, etc.);
16. Document what plants grew with what other plants (ecology);
17. Document the morphology and anatomy of individuals of a particular species in different locations (environmental variation);
18. Provide material for microscopic observations (anatomy, morphology);
19. Serve as a repository for voucher specimens (ecology, environmental impact studies, etc.);
20. Provide material for DNA analysis (systematics, evolution, genetics);
21. Provide material for chemical analysis (pollution documentation; bio-prospecting, for coralline algae - determining past ocean temperatures and chemical concentration);
22. Provide material for teaching (botany, taxonomy, field botany, plant communities);
23. Provide information for studies of expeditions and explorers (history of science);
24. Provide the label data necessary for accurate data-basing of specimens (biodiversity and conservation biology, biogeography);
25. Serve as a reference library for the identification of parts of plants found in archeology digs (paleoethnobotany);
26. Provide space and context for accompanying library and other bibliographic resources (library sciences, general research, taxonomy, etc.);
27. Serve as an archive for related material (field notebooks, letters, reprints, etc.);
28. Provide information on common names and local uses of plants (ethnobotany, economic botany);
29. Provide samples for the identification of plants that may be significant to criminal investigations (forensics);
30. Serve as a means of locating rare or possibly extinct species via recollecting areas listed on label data (conservation biology, environmental impact statements, endangered species, etc.);
31. Serve as an educational tool for the public (garden clubs, school groups, etc.); and
32. Provide a focal point for botanical interactions of all types (lectures, club meetings, etc.).

 The US National Herbarium has several urgent needs in order to make maximum use of its substantial resources: additional compactorization of collections to increase storage space, processing of the backlog of unmounted specimens so all material is available, photographing the type images so our most important specimens will be available on the web, and data-basing the specimen label information so it also can be made available on line.

Comments

[Adeniyi sheeiffdeen]

Thank you a lot. We still need more related topics on this.

[Ashiru saminu haladu]

Thanks for your contributions on our studies

[Dr.DEEPTHY MOL M.J]

Thanks for all.

Nice presentations and Excellent training programme

[Jacob mazala]

Can a herbarium be used for consultation purposes and educational purposes too?