Visiting the herbarium at California Academy of Sciences was magical. I always arrived before the museum opened, entered a staff door, and immediately walked into the huge silent halls of dimly-lit natural history museum exhibits - skeletons and stuffed animals arranged in different biomes. I had to pass through the museum en route to the elevator to the upper floors holding the herbarium collection. Low lighting and masses of dead critters (26 million!), some in recreated habitats, made an eerie horror movie setting.
I also felt privileged to share my life with all the scientists who had collected, curated, displayed and studied these exact organisms for 150 years, especially with the women who actually were sought for scientific (non-clerical) positions in the museum from its beginning in the late 1800's. Cal Academy's two million plant specimen herbarium is the largest collection of vascular plants in the western U.S. I never forgot, however, that these plants were known and grew here long before European colonists slapped Latin names on them and collected their bodies.
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Passiflora racemosa illustration from The Botanical Register (1815)
Herbaria aren't plant graveyards, despite their floristic corpses carefully placed in folders and stacked in large flat file drawers surrounded by mothballs. Halls and rooms are filled with tall wide metal files holding cardstock folders encasing millions of fragile, dry plants. Each specimen holds promise of discovering new relationships, taxonomic revisions, and broader scientific knowledge. Collectively, specimens precisely map flowers across landscapes and describe vegetation assemblages. Botanists routinely collect, press, label and submit plants to herbaria (baling hay we call it privately).
But there's also reverence because each specimen represents time, place and particular set of conditions for that individual plant, and for the botanist who collected it and whose name is on the label attached to the specimen sheet. Holding the exact plant collected and dried by a legendary botanist like Alice Eastwood or Albert Kellog links me through time to people whose names are associated with emblematic flora of the western U.S. Seventeen species are named for Alice Eastwood and two genera. Kellogg is responsible for Cal Academy's founding policy on recognizing and hiring women scientists and his name is given to many plant species, including the iconic California black oak (Quercus kelloggii). For scientists, nothing can take the place of these dried pressed plants, although digital data, photos, and GIS maps are useful.
Herbarium at Missouri Botanical Garden
That was the ode.
Here's the obituary.
More than 100 herbaria have closed in the past 18 years and less than half of the top 50 US universities that once offered advanced degrees in botany still do so. An article in the journal Nature, Plant collections left in the cold by cuts, reported on the dwindling herbaria and botany advanced degree programs. Many herbaria are funded through universities and research facilities. University funding is reduced, so they have fewer full-time with benefits faculty members, less research funding, and less money to curate plant collections.
Cal Academy herbarium survives and 45 years ago absorbed the Dudley Herbarium previously at Stanford. Recently, Missouri Botanical Garden received the Dunn-Palmer Herbarium's 119-year-old collection of more than 170,000 vascular plants and thousands of mosses, algae and fungi. Reduced funding also delays cataloguing newly acquired specimens, thus limiting their availability for years. Herbaria closures make the specimens less accessible, forcing scientists to travel further to see, touch, and evaluate the actual plants, something digital records cannot provide.
Ecologists and conservationists will always need to be able to distinguish thorn from thistle in the field, says biologist Roxanne Kellar of the University of Nebraska Omaha. Digital archives are useful, she says, but only with the real thing can you feel the points of a bristle or trace a tendril’s curl. “You can’t get those details from a picture.”
That sensory experience may be less valued these days because many botanists now find themselves small players in broader biological-sciences departments. Few outside their field appreciate the merits of having specimens on hand
These collections also inform broader topics such as climate change research.
Isotopic analyses of specimens of the rainforest species Humiria balsamifera that date as far back as 1788, for example, show that as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increased with industrialization, the plants responded by increasing photosynthetic activity and using water more efficiently . . . . The findings are important to climate modellers and others who want to predict how ecosystems will respond as CO2 levels rise in coming decades.
Phlomis cashmeriana specimen in the Kabul Herbarium, Afghanistan
The roles of botanists, other scientists and herbaria are enhanced and supported by the flood of information submitted by citizen scientists. Online databases document their observations of phenology, plants, birds, butterflies, ladybugs and other animals.
Wikipedia has a long list of citizen science projects that include a range of sciences in addition to biology. Crowd-sourced science helps researchers refine where to look and what questions to ask. We need more citizen scientists and public appreciation for professional science and our tools, including musty rooms filled with big tables and lots of metal files holding millions of dead plants.
Science degrees aren't needed to make worthwhile reports. Everyone has contributions to make and I encourage you to involve children in citizen science projects so respect and funding for all science is nurtured. The USA National Phenology Network is a good starting point for novices. The website provides tutorials and guidance on how to observe and makes it easy to become involved.
Once involved in one piece of nature, a person comes to see all nature.
John Muir said "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
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