“What is a herbarium?”
Marc Frank’s voice echoes above the murmurs and shuffling of a dozen students heading down a hallway on the 3rd floor of Dickinson Hall. Here on the University of Florida campus, our botanists and collection managers give tours to students from a myriad of other colleges and programs at UF. Many career paths intersect with the world of plants.
“People often think we grow plants here,” Marc tells them as he uses his badge to open the double doors to the herbarium collections. He explains that a herbarium is for preserved plant specimens rather than living ones. “We document and catalogue plants here,” he adds as he waves at straggling students to come through before letting the doors close behind them with a thump.
When they all shuffle out after their tour, some checking their phones and some talking about their classes, the 3rd floor is quiet again. For the moment.
A milestone sticker
Today the gathering in the herbarium commons has a different mood though. Unlike the usual breathlessness and curiosity of new students, people are chatting in English and Spanish, familiar and casual. This is a special occasion that researchers, students and volunteers want to witness.
The University of Florida Herbarium (FLAS), a collection of over 530,000 preserved plant specimens, is marking a major milestone with their 300,000th vascular plant specimen being accessioned into the collection!
Everyone watches as student Leif Martin ceremoniously leans over to carefully affix a barcode sticker to a specimen of Serenoa repens (saw palmetto), collected in Florida by Richard Abbott and mounted by student Bruna Good God. It will later be filed into one of the big metal cabinets where it will be available for generations of researchers.
The FLAS collection, founded in 1891 and housed at the Florida Museum of Natural History, documents the diversity of native and introduced plants in Florida and beyond. The collection contains specimens from all seven continents. However, its strengths are the flora of the southeastern United States and Caribbean, as well as a growing collection from across the western United States and parts of South America.
Specimens in the library
Scientific collections like those at museums are not just cabinets of specimens and objects. They are libraries of information, catalogs that record life as we know it through time and across space. The data collected and recorded is only valuable when it can be accessed by researchers and the public.
Formally accessioning a specimen into the collection is like adding another book to a library. It is one more data point mapping the history of our natural world. One more puzzle piece that contributes to the body of work researchers can access to inform us how best to steward our natural resources.
The University of Florida Herbarium serves constituents throughout the state of Florida and beyond, including providing identifications and resources for UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) Extension and Research personnel, the Florida Master Gardener Volunteer Program, and land management agencies across the state.
The collection is utilized by plant researchers around the world, including faculty and graduate students from numerous departments across the UF campus and at other institutions. It also serves as a training ground for the next generation of plant scientists at UF.
We are thrilled to share this milestone with everyone and are committed to growing and diversifying the collection.
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Contact: Lucas C. Majure, lmajure@floridamuseum.ufl.edu