#herbaria — Public Fediverse posts

We kijken nog niet zo lang, zo veel en zo goed naar ze als naar dagvlinders maar via #herbaria is toch historisch onderzoek mogelijk naar #mineermotten. Dat zijn kleine nachtvlinders die als rupsen gangetjes in bladeren graven en daar verpoppen. Ze worden daarom ook wel #vouwmijnmotten genoemd. Er zijn duizenden soorten alleen al in Nederland. Generalisten en specialisten. En net als in andere soortgroepen hebben specialisten het moeilijk.

Herbal (Botany 🌱)

A herbal is a book containing the names and descriptions of plants, usually with information on their medicinal, tonic, culinary, toxic, hallucinatory, aromatic, or magical powers, and the legends associated with them. A herbal may also classify the plants it describes, may give recipes for herbal extracts, tinctures, or potions, and sometimes include mineral and animal medicam...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbal

#Herbal #Botany #Herbals #Herbaria #Herbalism #BooksByType

In the past, #herbaria were bound volumes. Some had beautiful arrangements and even drawings of vases from which the plants would appear to be in.
At the NHM London, we have bound volumes by the Liberato Sabbati, curator of the Rome botanical garden in the mid 1700s. #CuratorLife #HerbariumLife

👍 With their #Herbarium Data Management Plan, the #Meise Botanic Garden establish clear guidelines for staff & other users in line with #FAIRdata principles; and in compliance with the #data requirements of their stakeholders. 🔗 Openly accessible at: https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.10.e124288

@gbif #collections #herbaria #plantscience #botany #plants #science #scientists #data #researchdata #scientific #publication #academic #biodiversity #naturalhistory #nathist #digitization

You might be familiar with the concept of the present “biodiversity crisis“. There is an increasing consensus in the ecological research community that the current loss of species this planet is experiencing is not sustainable, in the sense that the loss of some species may precipitate the loss of more, in an accelerating spiral. The paleontological community has found that the pattern of species loss is unusual even at the scale of geological time, potentially placing us among the great extinctions in geologic history, or at least a notably bad extinction event. A less diverse biosphere means the loss of ecosystem services associated with all of the species we lose, and potentially a less resilient biosphere, stacking the deck against us as the climate continues to change and life is forced to adapt. Because our global civilization depends on the wealth of the biosphere for our own well-being, this is definitely very bad news for humanity (I usually tend to avoid rationalizing conservation based on ecosystems’ value to us, believing that we have a moral imperative to preserve the biosphere, and organisms have an inherent right to exist outside of their economic value, but that’s a topic for another blog).

We are only aware of the loss of species due to centuries of careful collecting, cataloging, categorization and curation undertaken by conservationists around the world, including indigenous communities, museum professionals, taxonomists, seed banks, herbaria, and other very highly specialized and educated people. I won’t refer to these biodiversity experts as “countless”, because they’re actually a pretty small group of folks entrusted with an almost incomprehensible responsibility: to quantify the biological wealth of our world. They figure out when baselines are shifting, and their work keeps us accountable as we seek to stop the current bleeding of biodiversity.

I am writing this post because biological collections are having a moment of attention, and it’s been a topic I have been thinking of for some time as an outsider. Duke University recently announced that they will be throwing out their herbarium, an archive of plant samples which is one of the leading such collections in the US. The herbarium supports a vibrant ecosystem of research on the classification of plants, and is an important archive of plant diversity. Duke University, which has an endowment of $11 billion, claiming to not have the resources to support this archive is an unacceptable dereliction of their duty to preserve and nurture knowledge. And sadly, this closure of such an important collection is not a one-off event. Worldwide, taxonomist and curator jobs are declining. These are the people who spend decades learning how to tell one species of snail from another based on their genitalia. They discover cryptic species in collections. They prevent collections from degrading due to improper preservation, and charge in to save samples from fires. They process loans and when someone like me is belated in returning samples, they write a polite email reminding me to send samples back. When these people leave science, their skills can’t be easily replaced. If collections are lost, they literally can’t be replaced.

I am a biogeochemist, and not a museum worker by any means, but so much of my work has relied on biological archives. But by my count, 3/4 of my ongoing projects have used biological collections in some way. I wanted to list out some of the ways that biological collections have enabled my research, because I don’t think I’m unusual. Biodiversity curators are the keystone species in a vast ecosystem of interconnected research that wouldn’t happen without the hard work of maintaining collections. Please do what you can to protect biodiversity collections, whether by pressuring your representatives, your alma maters, and through donations.

Projects that relied on curators:

• Some of my most influential educational experiences relied on teaching collections, including at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, USC, LA Museum of Natural History, UC Santa Cruz and elsewhere. Without collections to get my hands on in lab exercises and other educational opportunities, my skills in ecology, organism ID and more would be greatly diminished.
• My second PhD chapter relied on samples of well-preserved Jurassic lithiotid bivalves which came from outcrops which mostly no longer exist, having been quarried out or already sampled. These were loaned by curators at the University of Padova and University of Verona Natural History Museums
• My third and fourth PhD chapters, and one of my postdoctoral papers used shells of giant clams that were stored at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Natural History Museum. These shells had been confiscated from poachers at the Egypt-Israel border and were loaned to me by curator Henk Mienis. I would rather these clams be still alive in the Red Sea, but at least we were able to use these for a series of papers about their ecology and physiology.
• Before my PhD fieldwork in Israel, I visited the California Academy of Science collection to view shells of Red Sea giant clams and practice species ID using a taxonomic key. I would also note that one of the species I have studied, Tridacna squamosina, is named because of the work of museum curators at University of Vienna.
• Another postdoctoral paper (in progress) on violet bittersweet clams from the Eastern Mediterranean made use of preserved samples collected during research cruises off the coast of Israel in the 1960s-1980s. These specimens, loaned by the Steinhardt Museum in Tel Aviv, represent some of the last observed live violet bittersweets seen off of Israel. They since have (likely) gone extinct in the region, probably due to sediment changes in the late 1980s following the construction of the Aswan Dam.
• Yet another postdoctoral paper in progress resulted from study of the growth and chemistry of shells of wavy turban shells loaned from the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, which we were comparing to individuals that grew in the hot waters of the Biosphere 2 tropical reef ocean tank. I met the curator Vanessa Delnavaz at the Southern California Union of Malacologists 2021 meeting, which was hosted by the museum. Museums are important centers of scientific organization and networking in addition to the value of their collections!

So I hope all of these anecdotes help make clear that biological collections are absolutely vital to enable an entire universe of research, and that we often can’t possibly predict what collections are going to be useful for which scientific purposes until long after the samples were preserved. So any budgetary bean-counters (not talking about bean taxonomists) should think twice before closing any collections! This is a core responsibility of academic institutions and we cannot allow any of these collections to be lost. Fund your local biological curators! Without their hard work, we’d be flying blind in the current biodiversity crisis. They’re the heroes we need, and that our earth deserves.

https://dantheclamman.blog/2024/02/27/the-biodiversity-collections-crisis/

#biodiversity #Biology #duke #ecology #herbaria #museums #research #science

labeleR: a new #Rstats package to automate the production of conference badges, certificates, labels for laboratory samples, #herbaria, #insect #collections, etc.

Easily turn a data frame with info (e.g. names, affiliations, etc) into PDF docs with optional logos, signatures, QR codes...

The #Rmarkdown and #TeXLaTeX templates can be customised easily, or alternative templates used.

With I. Ramos-Gutierrez & @juliagdealedo

https://ecologyr.github.io/labeleR/

AI reveals hidden traits about our planet’s flora to help save species

Scientists have trained AI to unlock data from millions of plant specimens kept in herbaria around the world, to study and combat the impacts of climate change on flora.   

https://globalplantcouncil.org/ai-reveals-hidden-traits-about-our-planets-flora-to-help-save-species/ #plantscience #plantsci #science #plants #herbaria #botany #climatechange

📢#OutNow in #OA: '#Decolonial #Ecologies: The Reinvention of #NaturalHistory in #LatinAmerican #Art', by Joanna Page.

In this book, Joanna Page illuminates the ways in which #contemporary #artists in #LatinAmerica are reinventing #historical methods of collecting, organizing, and displaying nature in order to develop new #aesthetic and #political perspectives on the past and the present.

Page brings together an entirely new corpus of #artistic projects from #Argentina, #Brazil, #Chile, #Colombia, #Ecuador, #Mexico, and #Peru that engage critically and creatively with forms as diverse as the #medieval #bestiary, #baroque #cabinetsofcuriosities, atlases created by #European travellers to the #NewWorld, the #floras and #herbaria composed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century #naturalists, and the #dioramas designed for #naturalhistory #museums.

Access this OA title for free or get a hard copy at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0339

https://www.uidaho.edu/sci/news/vandal-science/october-2019/stillinger_herbarium

University of Idaho in Moscow may soon be looking for an Herbarium collections manager. Very interesting!

#nativeplants #herbaria #botany #plantjobs #academia

I'm giving an #herbarium talk today at The Morton Arboretum (my home institution). It's about the importance of #herbaria and #specimens, and a vision possible next directions.

Including a link here in case you are interested and to hear your thoughts. Some of these are institution-specific, but the questions we're addressing in the #museum world and the worlds of #informalScienceEducation and #scicomm intersect. I'd love to hear how this overlaps with your ideas.

https://tinyurl.com/MORherb2023

Landing page for the 30 Special Feature papers across the British Ecological Society journals. Overseeing the plant papers in Journal of Ecology was a lot of fun. I love to see good use being made of #herbaria

Leveraging natural history collections to understand the impacts of global change

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/leveraging_natural_history?=

New paper out with postdoc Amanda Wu (https://awu-blog.weebly.com/) on morphological and #genomic distinctiveness of IUCN-#endangered maple-leaf oak (Quercus acerifolia). Uses #botanicGardens to account for #plasticity, #herbaria to cover range, and random #field sampling. Findings:

1. Q. acerifolia is distinct, weakly differentiated from Q. shumardii.

2. Herbarium samples are biased against morphological intermediates.

So: good #species ?

#oaks #taxonomy #conservation

https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.18777

#Herbaria are not just about #plants but also about #history. #CuratorLife is also about learning about collectors. Today, I solved the mystery of a collector from India, "Col. R.S. Vine". It's Roland Stephen Vine (1910-2003). He was with the #RAMC, the Royal Army Medical Corps, and stationed in India between 1936 and 1939. That's when we have his collections from India from. But he also collected in the UK and Greece but those collections are in Kew #Herbarium.

#Museum30 Day 26 - ‘Colleague'
Today, I'd like to use the occasion to give a shout out to all dear #curator colleagues in #museums and #herbaria who take care of the human heritage, discover new aspects, help to interpret it, make #exhibitions happen and share the cool things to know, often with little pay and much pressure. #museodon

#Museum30 Day 20 - ‘Bookshelves'
While #herbaria are usually single sheets with pressed #plants nowadays, originally they were #books with pressed #flowers. The #NHMLondon has more than 1300 volumes of such books and collection sets. You can browse the complete dataset here: https://doi.org/10.5519/swp7oysf

We featured some amazing examples from this dataset in the latest NHM blog (published today!): https://naturalhistorymuseum.blog/2022/11/20/when-is-a-book-not-a-book-the-bound-volumes-and-exsiccatae-in-the-herbarium-at-the-natural-history-museum-curator-of-botany/
#histodon #museodon #HistoryOfScience #herbarium #library #tourism #WomenInSTEM

#Introduction. Greetings from SW Australia where it’s easy to get overwhelmed by breath-taking biodiversity. I’m a plant taxonomist at #WAHerbarium, currently synthesizing >2 decades of work on the #Triggerplant family #Stylidiaceae for #FloraofAustralia, with a phylogenomic framework coming down the pike. Tooting mostly about #AustralianPlants, #Botany, #Taxonomy, #Herbaria and #Conservation

@Worldturgreen @PLOSBiology I agree, a bad photo or missing characters are the usual issues. In #herbaria, many specimens remain unidentified (and unidentifiable) because essential characters were not collected (e.g., #Commelinaceae are quite notorious as you often need the seeds but the pretty flowers are collected). Sadly, there is so strict rule for all plants which characters are important and which are not. Every group has its own set of traits to distinguish taxa.

#Museum30 Day 15 - ‘Page'
Title pages of #books are often ornamental. #Herbaria bound in a book sometimes go further like this example from the #NHMLondon. Some #herbarium creators made amazing title pages and real #art.
#MastoArt

It's November, which is the month of #Museum30.
Day 1 - #Museum.
I'm working in the #herbarium at the #NaturalHistoryMuseum in #London. The #NHMLondon was split off the #BritishMuseum in 1881, which itself was born out of Hans #Sloane's (1660-1753) collections of plants, animals, coins, manuscripts, books, antiquities etc.
The natural history collections have a long and complex history. Almost 2 years ago, I wrote a short piece on the history of the NHM #herbaria: https://issuu.com/thevasculum/docs/vasculum_16.1/s/11551043

The NHM in London has about 6 million specimens of plants (and lichens, but no fungi). In my section, I take care of about 500,000-600,000 specimens.

As you can imagine, it is not to easy and cheap to travel to herbaria, and it's not always necessary. That's why many #herbaria digitise their collections. In order to find them, we scan and database them. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of time, but we are working hard.

#Herbaria are such collections. They store many many samples of usually dried and pressed plants. They are basically a #library of #plant #species.
Just like a #librarian, I need to keep order in the chaos, help scientists and visitors to get access or send material on loan. I also provide help to interpret old labels, and I update and reidentify the material.

This is where I work: the #herbarium at the #NaturalHistoryMuseum in London:

So, who gives a plant #species its name?
Well, technically, everybody can do it, but there are rules to it (called #nomenclature) and you need to make a convincing case that the plant you think is new and deserves a name is in fact significantly different from all plants known so far.
In order to do that, you need to know the plants that are related to the potential new plant and how they look like.
This is the point where collections of plant samples, so called #herbaria come into play.