From Plant Press, Vol. 17, No. 4, October 2014.
A Curator’s Perspective
By Vicki A. Funk*
Update: Editor’s Note – The phrase ‘A Curator’s Perspective’ was intended to convey that the opinions expressed below do not represent those of the National Museum of Natural History or the Smithsonian Institution
Over the last few years many visitors have passed through the doors of the U.S. National Herbarium (Herbarium Code: US) bringing depressing news about some of our fellow botanical institutions and research centers. Institutions, which house historic and otherwise important botanical specimens, have been closed. The scientists who study, preserve, and curate them, have been fired, downsized, forced into retirement, or had their focus directed away from taxonomy and systematics. When reasons are given they usually involve budget shortfalls; unfortunately, collections and research are easy targets. But when I mentioned this to one former museum director who was visiting, his reply was, “When I was a director and had a budget shortfall I went out and raised more money, I did not fire my staff!”
Is this a trend or a coincidence? Perhaps a more detailed examination of events will provide an answer and so we begin with the Milwaukee Public Museum and continue up to the ongoing recent troubles at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (FTG; established in 1936; 165,000 specimens).
Fairchild has long been active in systematic research. The board and administration decided to move to a different model where they would no longer pay the salaries of research staff but rather have Florida International University faculty work out of Fairchild. They currently have only one research scientist working there. Over a period from 2007 to 2009, the emphasis for research seems to have shifted from tropical systematics to ecology and conservation. In fact, you cannot even find the herbarium on the Fairchild website. If you search for it on Google all you can find is the FTG Virtual Herbarium which contains only about half the collections.
New York State Museum, Albany (NYS; established in 1836; 279,000 specimens).
Most of the research staff was let go a few years ago, including all of the botanists. According to the staff directory, there are four curators, all zoologists, one of which appears to be a state employee. They do have collection managers listed for most collections, including botany, but the herbarium does not appear to have an active research program.
Brooklyn Botanical Garden (BKL; established in 1910; 300,000 specimens).
In August 2013, Brooklyn Botanic Garden suspended its research program and shuttered its herbarium. All members of the Garden’s Science Department were laid off, except for one herbarium assistant who was transferred elsewhere and a part-time plant mounter. The Science Department’s director was on sabbatical at NSF and she has since left the Garden for a position elsewhere. The Director of Living Collections was made the Director of Collections with the additional responsibility of managing the herbarium. The staff laid off had 60 years of combined experience with BKL. Currently no scientific research is being conducted at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The herbarium, once widely used by scientists especially those doing research in New York City and Long Island, remains essentially inaccessible to the public.
Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio) (INB; established in 1989; 183,000 specimens).
In 2011 INBIO announced that it was going out of the collections and research business. The herbarium was rapidly moved into another building because the building built specifically for the herbarium, had been sold. Recently, the entire staff was let go. This important collection is completely databased and available on line and together with the herbarium at the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica (CR; 215,000 specimens) they make Costa Rica the best botanically documented country between Mexico City and Bogota. Fortunately, the Museo has agreed to take charge of the herbarium; although, currently, they do not have the space to incorporate the specimens. So far, there is no guarantee that there will be jobs for the staff. Hopefully, there will be a new building constructed so that both collections can be combined and additional trained staff will be hired to manage it.
Field Museum of Natural History (F; established in 1893; 2,700,000 specimens).
Staffing for research and collections at the Field Museum had been on the decline for years. Beginning in 2009, between buyouts and staff leaving for other jobs, science staffing took a steep turn downward. Currently, there are only two curators in Botany and three support staff to study and manage the enormous resource. Fortunately there are three emeriti that continue to work. There are no science departments, just one “Action Science Center.” The collections are well maintained because of the dedication of collections staff but there is no real growth. However, the emphasis seems to be on marketable skills and plant taxonomy does not seem to be on the list. There is no announced plan to hire additional staff.
California Academy of Sciences (CAS; established in 1853; 2,000,000 specimens).
Recently the administration of CAS has decided to shift the focus of the museum. Established scientists were pressured into retiring, new people will be hired but they will have a significant focus on outreach using social media. Oddly this comes after the construction of a new building to house the collections.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (K; established in 1759; became a government institution in 1841; 7,000,000 specimens with well over 350,000 types).
For months rumors have been in circulation about the drastic changes that are taking place at Kew. Finally enough people have visited and others have passed through US, that we are getting a better picture of what is happening. Kew, long a premier botanical institution for research and collections, is under serious attack. Reports indicate that the Herbarium, Jodrell Laboratory, and Millennium Seed Bank are to undergo drastic administrative changes and a significant reduction in science staff. The major structural change is that these three administrative units will be replaced by six focal areas: Collections, Identification and Naming, Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology, Conservation, Natural Capital, and Biodiversity Informatics. Nine people have been appointed to guaranteed new positions. Everyone else is being forced to apply for open new positions that are made available.
When this crisis at Kew started 25 people decided to retire and those positions were lost altogether. That left 200 staff members in the three units. The scientific staff is scheduled to be reduced from 200 to 176 which makes it seem as if only 24 positions will be lost. However this number is misleading—the 176 positions include 12 new positions in Biodiversity Informatics, at least some of which may need to be hired from outside Kew, which would further reduce the number of current Kew staff to be retained. Also, the new positions include 27 ‘Career Development Fellows,’ which are fixed non-renewable term (3-5 years) appointments designed to develop researchers from current Kew staff. These staff members are then apparently expected to seek research positions at Kew, attract independent funding, or simply become redundant and have to leave Kew.
Except for the heads of the new focal areas and a limited number of new slots that are very close to existing ones, everyone else will have to apply for one or more of the positions that have been created in the new structure. Any new positions that are not filled by current Kew staff will be opened to a wider pool of applicants. It appears then that at a minimum, 24 current Kew staff members in science will lose their jobs by December 1 but reason suggests that the number could be significantly higher. Taking all of this into account, the total loss of permanent jobs in science at Kew will probably be at least 50 or 25 percent of the current permanent science positions. However, if you include the 25 that took retirement the loss of science positions would be 34 percent.
Equally disturbing is the division of the remaining herbarium staff into three areas: Americas, Africa, and Asia. Systematic groups such as the “Legumes” will no longer exist and the leaders and staff of these groups will have to compete for jobs with everyone else. What is striking about this is that most of the world (including Kew scientists) has been moving to synthetic work with a global focus and yet the administration at Kew is choosing to balkanize their research into areas. It is amazing that Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris (P) has just worked hard to break down such barriers while Kew is building them. It makes it difficult for specialists in a particular family to view a plant group from a global perspective. Will we no longer have “world experts” at Kew?
In addition, the loss of support staff at Kew will be great and that will mean that curators will have to spend more time doing technical work and less time on science. Those scientists that are able to obtain one of the herbarium positions may very well find themselves overwhelmed with collections work as well as mentoring and teaching and as a result have very little time to do research. Certainly Kew has a budget shortfall but when you balance the budget by gutting research and collections staff you fail to recognize that expertise in a group of plants is built up over many years and cannot be replicated once it is lost.
Biological specimens are critical for the next frontiers of climate change studies: they provide the evidence of past as well as present distributions. A deeper understanding of life on Earth in the past can help us predict and possibly mitigate the worst impacts of climate change in the future. Such information is not readily available but it is becoming more so. For some collections it is now possible to view their data and images online and this allows us to use advanced modeling techniques to predict which species may survive and which may go extinct.
Images alone are not enough. Names of organisms change frequently and these proposed changes need to be evaluated and either accepted or rejected. More importantly, a specimen is only useful if it has a proper identification. Many specimens are misidentified. Insuring that something is correctly identified requires a detailed examination of the actual specimen, usually under a microscope. As a result, all collections require constant curation to make them useful for climate change studies and other biodiversity studies. Collections that are not studied and maintained, even if they are physically well cared for, can become out-of-date and less useful.
The utility of collections does not stop with climate change. If you search for “Biological Collections” in Google Scholar, you will find a host of references on the use of such specimens ranging from phenological data to populations trends, utility of vouchers, DNA based phylogenies, biodiversity estimates, and trait evolution.
Lastly, the actions of these gardens and museums fail to take into account that to be relevant and useful collections must continue to grow as new discoveries are made. Expeditions to poorly understood areas are critical for filling in holes in our data and for collecting new material in ways that allow the preservation of genome quality tissue for new methods of investigation. It seems that just when the world is beating a path to our door and asking for help and collaboration we are closing our doors and turning them away.
Here at the Smithsonian Institution we are not immune. Since I was hired in 1981, our scientific staff has shrunk by about 50 percent and our collections staff even more. The Botany staff at the Smithsonian is concerned about our colleagues and the collections they study, at Kew and around the world. It is troubling that there seems to be an alarming trend in museum and garden administrations to devalue collections and the staff who study and care for them. This is a critical point in time to work toward a world-wide effort to stop and reverse this attrition.
* With contributions by many individuals in the botanical community.
All these sad news reflect a general change of focus in academic institutions: employment of stupid bureaucrats to produce trival knowledge for an uneducated audience
Posted by: Bjarte Jordal | 10/29/2014 at 06:29 AM
Extremely lucid and enlightening. Zoological collections are also experiencing this widespread neglect, perhaps with more serious consequences in terms of specimens being lost forever. I wonder if the solution is to fire all the business managers and let scientists explain to society at large what is important.
Posted by: Cristian R. Altaba | 10/29/2014 at 08:57 AM
When I was hired by a certain natural history museum in 1970, the new director hired 6 Ph.D.s and the Museum became known as a “small research-based museum,” a nice title, and the Curators had some say in what was going on. We even met a few times with the Board.
In the 1990’s, however, a new director came on who used Drucker’s management by objective and we were then focused on planning. Not results, just planning. Every year we had to come up with a new great-looking plan. He doubled his salary, talked big about getting in an IMAX theater, and hired consultants to tell us what our “audience” was, which was of course young couples with small children. He began to tear out long-loved exhibits and replace them with ill-conceived distance learning and kiddy teaching modules in the halls. He closed the library after selling the Audubon folio and valuable books. Special Curatorial funds were broken and sent to the general fund. He sold anthropology material of value (Chinese ancient vases) that did not quite have complete provenance. He emphasized block-buster exhibits. He left when the money began to fail.
A new director then began with Total Quality Management, team-work and pro-activeness. Teamwork broke up long-established internal power blocks (he eliminated the Curatorial Department), and insistence on pro-activeness eliminated direct responsibility of the administration for bad decisions. He focused on education but then eliminated the education department and fired anyone with expertise in teaching, instead hiring part time college kids to set up hallway kiosks. He doubled his salary. He eliminated all the old departments and instituted new departments that emphasized teamwork, like the “Experience Group.” He then fired all the curators, keeping only the dinosaur expert as part-time. External “research associates” are listed as scientific staff. He left when the money began to fail.
The new director after him is an ex-manager from an entertainment company. He is there now. The particularly fine 50,000 specimen herbarium with much mid-1800's material is “curated” by an amateur group allowed in one day a week. The excellent library is closed except for a few hours a week on appointment when a non-librarian finds time to stand watch.
Posted by: Richard Zander | 10/29/2014 at 10:11 AM
I am glad to say that we were recently able to endow our systematist position to ensure that we will always have the position at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden (~150,000 specimens in our herbarium). Efforts like this are essential to mitigate against the vagaries of changing donor desires or, for Government funded institutions, cutbacks in funding. Beyond trying to build endowments to support these positions, this trend means that we must do a better job of explaining why maintaining a scientific natural history collection is important in ways that the general public (and more importantly donors) will understand. Some institutions have great examples of this, others have still been unable to make the case. The days of significant financial support for general botany or science are long gone. With this shift, it has changed the way we need to raise money to support these efforts. We have to tell stories about how our herbaria are used in a way that makes them relevant to the issues that the donors care about -- food supply and sometimes conservation are leading issues. Exploration and discovery are not issues that resonate as they seemed to in the past.
Don't (just) blame shortsighted administration for these cutbacks and layoffs -- we should also hold accountable the researchers who have been unable to make the case -- even within their own botanical institution -- for why their jobs and fields of study should be preserved. I know the leaders of many of the institutions mentioned above and I can guarantee that no one set out to eliminate their science or research programs, but as the funding climate changes in 2008, difficult choices had to be made. And while the economy has rebounded we have not seen a change in funding patterns. In a situation with rising costs and shrinking revenue, difficult choices will be made. It is the responsibility of the researchers to help make the case for their field of study as heartily as the educators and others within our museums are making the case for their disciplines, and to help the administration raise the money needed by explaining (in way that will at least convince the inner circle at the museum) that curation of objects still matters in an increasingly digital age.
Posted by: Steve Windhager | 10/29/2014 at 11:48 AM
With the current possibility of extracting DNA, metabolites, toxins, pollutants etc from specimens, I do believe herbaria, and other biological collections, really ought to be experiencing a renaissance. The ability to peer back into the genetics and chemistry of organisms, decades or centuries old and often with localities and dates, is enormously exciting - and will be important for an immense range of research areas, within and outside biology. Yet in the actual world today - with exceptions of course - there does seem to be a general attack on herbaria and other biological collections. I wonder if this is an obsolete response to a perceived (N.B. not actual) lack of relevance, dating back a decade or two, to before the new era of sequencing and molecular characterization. Herbaria have always been important - just, I do find RIGHT NOW to be a particularly strange time for funders and administrators to fail to notice this.
Posted by: Daniel Barker | 10/29/2014 at 12:30 PM
There are rumors that the herbarium at San Francisco State University, which houses the largest collection of fungi west of the Mississippi, may be axed following the retirement of its current director, on the flimsy and narrow-minded basis that more profitable uses of the space exist. Direct action has been sworn by more than one student/researcher. A school with as strong a history of protest and civil disobedience as SFSU will surely live up to its reputation if that day ever comes.
Posted by: Danny Newman | 10/30/2014 at 02:05 PM
Your essay is very timely but the irony of the current situation must be emphasized. We are living in an age of public and political concern about the decline of biological diversity. For example, members of the North American Pollinators Protection Campaign receive weekly messages about opportunities for research and/or community projects. What seems to be missing, outside such specialty groups, is the obvious and essential link between the validity of funding various public/political efforts to promote diversity by maintaining staff and collection programs at museums. You can't have one without the other. The "health" of environments must always be measured, in part, by the identification, location, dating and quantification of specimens.
How do we get this message across to the voting public and to private industries and philanthropists? You can't maintain diversity and quality of private/public gardens, refuges, state/federal parks etc. without space and salaries allocated to the identification, care and educational exhibit of specimens. The public and the politicians have either forgotten this or were never informed. Your photos indicate there are good models of museums with healthy budgets for staff and space. What can we learn from them? How do we emulate them and how do we best inform those in a position to make positive changes?
Posted by: Peter Bernhardt | 10/31/2014 at 11:00 AM
The objective of museums is research, not entertainment. The actions by the aforementioned administrations are blatantly contrary to this fundamental objective of museums. The new wave of administrators clearly don't understand this fact, and it seems are not even biologists. The California Academy of Sciences for example is not titled the California Themepark of Sciences, yet. What will happen to these incredible and important collections are shuttered by administrations more focused on making money than actually fulfilling the societal role of museums?
Perhaps biologists will have to found new, uncorrupted institutions.
Posted by: Entomologist | 10/31/2014 at 11:41 AM
Assuming that Richard Zander is talking about the same museum, there was no single ‘firing’ of all curators with the exception of a dinosaur specialist that I know of. There was a termination of some research curators before I joined the museum in 2002 that occurred along with loss of other positions (so the reduction was not purely one directed at curators). When I arrived, or soon thereafter, there were (including myself) three research curators (entomology, anthropology, geology) (and an additional curator emeritus). Then the museum underwent a further overall reduction of all staff due to severe financial conditions. This left only two full time curatorial positions and a contract research position for the geology curator. The anthropology position later became vacant but could not be filled due to a subsequent reduction of government funding. Later a new ecologist management position was created for the nature preserve (which was definitely needed). Then a decision was made to end all research related positions, including mine and the contract position. Collections management had earlier been removed from research curatorial oversight and staffing was expanded. Interestingly, the American Association of Museums assesses museums for the collection maintenance, but not research maintenance.
Posted by: John Grehan | 10/31/2014 at 12:50 PM
I wanted to take a moment to reassure you that the California Academy of Sciences is not reducing its focus on collections-based science. Quite the opposite. All of us here believe that -- in the midst of rapid and dramatic changes to our planet's biodiversity -- there has never been a more important time to conduct collections-based science. (This is one of the reasons that we took the lead in authoring a response to Science a few months back about the importance of collecting scientific specimens!) Because of the specimen collections that we curate and study, institutions like ours are uniquely equipped to provide baseline data about the health of our planet's ecosystems, identify the most important regions to protect, and partner with governments and conservation organizations to address some of the most pressing sustainability challenges of our time.
Since 2000, the California Academy of Sciences has hired nine new curators and has doubled its direct funding of scientific research. At a time when many similar institutions have reduced their research staff and expenditures, we have done the opposite. Yes, some of our longest-tenured curators elected to participate in an enhanced voluntary retirement program earlier this year. While we will never be able to replace them (and are fortunate to still collaborate with them as Emeritus Curators), we have already begun the process of reinvesting in our research program by searching for new members of our team. For instance, we are currently accepting applications for a new Schlinger Chair of Arachnology.
The new curators we hire will have the same general job description as all of the scientists here at the Academy -- to add to our understanding of life on Earth and to share what we learn with the people (including policy makers, community members, and the next generation of scientists) who will shape its future. We believe wholeheartedly that excellent scientists can and should also be excellent science communicators! Yes, social media is one way that we share our findings and hope to inspire change. So are interacting with visitors on our public floor and on our website, building partnerships with governments and conservation organizations, and participating in educational outreach activities in the communities in which we work. Discovery, through both field work and lab-based collections work, is the foundation of everything we do here at the Academy, but our work doesn't stop with discovery. We are also committed to applying what we learn to addressing critical sustainability challenges.
Margaret (Meg) Lowman, PhD
Chief of Science and Sustainability
Institute for Biodiversity Science and Sustainability
California Academy of Sciences
Posted by: Meg Lowman | 11/01/2014 at 06:08 PM
Thanks for all the interesting and useful comments. I am going to prepare a response, including some information that has come in via email so if anyone else has anything to say, examples to add, or things they disagree with please let me know. I should say that recent information from some folks at Kew indicates that the numbers are changing a bit and so the dust has not completely settled. There should be some new numbers soon. Let's hope he administration at Kew is moderating their stance. We await further development. Vicki
Posted by: Vicki Funk | 11/05/2014 at 06:56 AM
Unfortunately in these times of government spending cuts, the importance and value of herbaria are easily overlooked by the unenlightened public, elected officials, and institutional administrators. It is a low hanging fruit, a sitting duck waiting to be cut for austerity budgets. The word needs to be spread about this folly and those responsible need to be held to account and shamed for their tunnel vision. The scientists and other directly affected stakeholders need to spread the word so this gets into the public debate before it's too late. I'm very sad to see these venerable New York institutions being gutted by the penny wise and pound foolish Cuomo administration. THANKS Vicki for raising the issue!
Posted by: Daniel Weinstock, M.D. | 11/06/2014 at 06:29 PM
Vicki, your comments are timely and most important. Here in Brazil we feel we still have room to conduct research in systematics, enhance our collections, etc. But trends from the developed world always hit us, and at the moment many negative trends are popping up. One is the dominance by ecology experts or other specialists that are not systematists in leadership roles in government and science policy, instituting one-sided metrics to judge productivity, visibility etc. In other words all the current negative trends of research in developed nations -- those that focus on selling science to the general public, market-value, PR, over-reaching conclusions, exaggerated implications of studies, etc. -- are finding a niche here too. As one viewer commented, such irony…. Thanks Vicki!
Marcelo de Carvalho
USP, São Paulo
Posted by: Marcelo de Carvalho | 11/10/2014 at 06:03 PM
The University of Iowa decided around a decade ago that we didn't need our herbarium, and they transferred it to our sister institution, Iowa State University, over 100 miles to the west in Ames, Iowa. There were few if any faculty in Biology and related sciences that objected. So much of their current work hinges on molecular biology, so who needs a plant collection and curatorial staff? I saw this happening elsewhere too. Disgusting!
Posted by: Richard Baker | 02/18/2016 at 09:46 AM