24 August 2004
The American Society of Plant Taxonomists affirms the crucial role of natural history collections, and of plant collections in particular, in research, teaching, and public outreach. Collections of plant specimens (herbaria) are the foundation for all studies of plant diversity and evolution. Specimens provide enormous economic and scientific returns to society and are irreplaceable resources that must be preserved for future generations.
Specimens provide the foundation of nomenclature, the basis for identification, the common reference for communication, and the vouchers for floras, as well as for evolutionary and genomic studies. Molecular and morphological characters that allow us to reconstruct the history of life can be obtained from herbarium specimens. All fields of biological science from the level of molecular biology to ecosystem science are dependent on collections, not just for application of names, but as the basis for referencing all aspects of biodiversity.
Beyond their scientific importance, herbarium collections offer many benefits to society by providing data or reference materials for critical endeavors such as agriculture, human health, biosecurity, forensics, control of invasive species, conservation biology, natural resources, and land management. Herbarium collections provide a wealth of information on our natural heritage and extend back hundreds of years; thus they provide the only reliable, verifiable record of the changes to our flora during the expansion of human population.
Because natural history collections play such an important role in societal endeavors, continued physical and financial support is absolutely critical. Collections are most valuable in their original institutional and geographical context. Because they are historical records linked to a time and place, lost collections cannot be replaced. Moreover, many populations documented in herbaria no longer exist and others are now protected. Furthermore, some specimens cannot be replaced due to the imposition of constraints on collecting. Therefore, ASPT strongly advises institutions to maintain their collections in perpetuity. Once an institution divests itself of a collection the institution can never regain the benefits associated with the collection.
It is imperative that minimum standards regarding environmental conditions and pest control be met so that specimens can be maintained indefinitely into the future. As a body of considerable expertise with regard to all aspects of herbarium curation, research, education, and outreach, the membership of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists hereby offers its expertise to help institutions develop management plans for maintaining collections and to integrate herbarium collections more effectively into research, education, and outreach activities.
To recap from another source (SERNEC ca. 2006):
An Herbarium is traditionally known as a collection of plant specimens used for teaching and research. Herbaria are important for preserving species data, for historical distribution information, and for comparative reference information. There are nearly 215 herbaria in the Southeast United States, and each one has its own particular scope and focus. Together, these herbaria house an almost complete representation of regional plant information.
From the Harvard University Herbarium (2008)
Some of the earliest herbaria were founded in Europe in the early 1600's, during the days of exploration, when knowledge of the earth's flora was growing at such a rapid pace that botanical gardens could no longer maintain living examples of every known species. While herbarium collections of all sizes exist today, there are fewer than 75 herbaria worldwide with more than one million specimens.
Herbarium collections have been built up over the years by the efforts of numerous botanists and plant collectors who have searched from remote and isolated jungles to inner city waste lots and railroad tracks to document the diversity and distribution of the earth's flora. Representatives of most known species of plants can be found in herbaria today, carefully mounted on sheets of archival quality paper, labeled with important information about them, and stored on shelves in cabinets. In essence, a herbarium is analogous to a library of carefully preserved plants where the specimens themselves and the labels associated with them provide a wealth of information once they have been "read" and studied by scientists.
A specimen and its label are equally important. The care with which the specimen is collected and pressed gives essential clues to its morphology; the extent to which the label documents and describes features of the plant and its habitat, the exact collection locality, the name of the collector and date of collection, and the correct identification, ultimately determines a specimen's scientific value.
The herbarium houses the documentation of the world's flora; the specimens are the key to understanding plant relationships, geographic distributions, economic usefulness, even their molecular makeup. As we lose natural habitats the world over, herbaria increasingly serve as a record of the recent history of plant life, and as a repository of precious genetic information. Herbaria hold the tools for our understanding of the plant world
From the New York Times: Published: August 10, 2009
Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World
By
CAROL KAESUK YOON
One spring when I was a graduate student, I would go each Monday down
into the bowels of the entomology building. There I would meet Prof.
Jack Franclemont, an elderly gentleman always with a little dog in tow,
to be tutored in the ordering and naming of life — the science of
taxonomy.
Professor Franclemont, a famed moth specialist, was perfectly old
school, wearing coat and tie to give the day’s lecture even though I was
the only member of the audience. Quaintly distracted, he never quite got
my name right, sometimes calling me Miss Loon or Miss Voon. After the
talk, I would identify moths using a guide written in 1923, in silence
or listening to stories of his dog’s latest antics. I enjoyed the
meditative pleasure of those hours, despite the fact that as the lone
(and not terribly proficient) student of an aging teacher, I could not
help feeling that taxonomy might be dying, which, in fact, it is.
Despite the field’s now blatant modernity, with practitioners using DNA
sequences, sophisticated evolutionary theory and supercomputers to order
and name all of life, jobs for taxonomists continue to be in steady
decline. The natural history collections crucial to the work are
closeted or tossed.
Outside taxonomy, no one is much up in arms about this, but perhaps we
should be, because the ordering and naming of life is no esoteric
science. The past few decades have seen a stream of studies that show
that sorting and naming the natural world is a universal, deep-seated
and fundamental human activity, one we cannot afford to lose because it
is essential to understanding the living world, and our place in it.
Anthropologists were the first to recognize that taxonomy might be more
than the science officially founded by Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish
botanist, in the 1700s. Studying how nonscientists order and name life,
creating what are called folk taxonomies, anthropologists began to
realize that when people across the globe were creating ordered groups
and giving names to what lived around them, they followed highly
stereotyped patterns, appearing unconsciously to follow a set of
unwritten rules. Not that conformity to rules was at first obvious to
anthropologists who were instead understandably dazzled by the variety
in folk taxonomies. The Ilongots, for example, a people of the
Philippines, name gorgeous wild orchids after human body parts. There
bloom the thighs, there fingernails, yonder elbows and thumbs. The
Rofaifo people of New Guinea, excellent natural historians, classify the
cassowary, a giant bird complete with requisite feathers and beak, as a
mammal. In fact, there seemed, at first glance, to be little room even
for agreement among people, let alone a set of universally followed
rules. More recently, however, deep underlying similarities have begun
to become apparent.
Cecil Brown, an anthropologist at Northern Illinois University who has
studied folk taxonomies in 188 languages, has found that people
recognize the same basic categories repeatedly, including fish, birds,
snakes, mammals, “wugs” (meaning worms and insects, or what we might
call creepy-crawlies), trees, vines, herbs and bushes.
Dr. Brown’s finding would be considerably less interesting if these
categories were clear-cut depictions of reality that must inevitably be
recognized. But tree and bush are hardly that, since there is no way to
define a tree versus a bush. The two categories grade insensibly into
one another. Wugs, likewise, are neither an evolutionarily nor
ecologically nor otherwise cohesive group. Still, people repeatedly
recognize and name these oddities.
Likewise, people consistently use two-word epithets to designate
specific organisms within a larger group of organisms, despite there
being an infinitude of potentially more logical methods. It is so
familiar that it is hard to notice. In English, among the oaks, we
distinguish the pin oak, among bears, grizzly bears. When Mayan Indians,
familiar with the wild piglike creature known as peccaries, encountered
Spaniards’ pigs, they dubbed them “village peccaries.” We use two-part
names for ourselves as well: Sally Smith or Li Wen. Even scientists are
bound by this practice, insisting on Latin binomials for species.
There appears to be such profound unconscious agreement that people will
even concur on which exact words make the best names for particular
organisms. Brent Berlin, an ethnobiologist at the University of Georgia,
discovered this when he read 50 pairs of names, each consisting of one
bird and one fish name, to a group of 100 undergraduates, and asked them
to identify which was which. The names had been randomly chosen from the
language of Peru’s Huambisa people, to which the students had had no
previous exposure. With such a large sample size — there were 5,000
choices being made — the students should have scored 50 percent or very
close to it if they were blindly guessing. Instead, they identified the
bird and fish names correctly 58 percent of the time, significantly more
often than expected for random guessing. Somehow they were often able to
intuit the names’ birdiness or fishiness.
The most surprising evidence for the deep-seatedness of taxonomy comes
from patients who have, through accident or disease, suffered traumas of
the brain. Consider the case of the university student whom British
researchers refer to simply as J.B.R. Doctors found that upon recovering
from swelling of the brain caused by herpes, J.B.R. could no longer
recognize living things.
He could still recognize nonliving objects, like a flashlight, a
compass, a kettle or a canoe. But the young man was unable to recognize
a kangaroo, a mushroom or a buttercup. He could not say what a parrot or
even the unmistakable ostrich was. And J.B.R. is far from alone; doctors
around the world have found patients with the same difficulty. Most
recently, scientists studying these patients’ brains have reported
repeatedly finding damage — a deadening of activity or actual lesions —
in a region of the temporal lobe, leading some researchers to
hypothesize that there might be a specific part of the brain that is
devoted to the doing of taxonomy. As curious as they are, these patients
and their woes would be of little relevance to our own lives, if they
had merely lost some dispensable librarianlike ability to classify
living things. As it turns out, their situation is much worse. These are
people completely at sea. Without the power to order and name life, a
person simply does not know how to live in the world, how to understand
it. How to tell the carrot from the cat — which to grate and which to
pet? They are utterly lost, anchorless in a strange and confusing world.
Because to order and name life is to have a sense of the world around,
and, as a result, what one’s place is in it.
Today few people are proficient in the ordering and naming of life.
There are the dwindling professional taxonomists, and fast-declining
peoples like the Tzeltal Maya of Mexico, among whom a 2-year-old can
name more than 30 different plants and whose 4-year-olds can recognize
nearly 100. Things were different once. In Linnaeus’s day, it was a
matter of aristocratic pride to have a wonderful and wonderfully curated
collection of wild organisms, both dead and alive. Darwin (who gained
fame first as the world’s foremost barnacle taxonomist) might have
expected any dinner-party conversation to turn taxonomic, after an
afternoon of beetle-hunting or wildflower study. Most of us claim and
enjoy no such expertise.
We are, all of us, abandoning taxonomy, the ordering and naming of life.
We are willfully becoming poor J.B.R., losing the ability to order and
name and therefore losing a connection to and a place in the living
world.
No wonder so few of us can really see what is out there. Even when scads
of insistent wildlife appear with a flourish right in front of us, and
there is such life always — hawks migrating over the parking lot, great
colorful moths banging up against the window at night — we barely seem
to notice. We are so disconnected from the living world that we can live
in the midst of a mass extinction, of the rapid invasion everywhere of
new and noxious species, entirely unaware that anything is happening.
Happily, changing all this turns out to be easy. Just find an organism,
any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are
everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell,
sound. Give a nod to Professor Franclemont and meditate, luxuriate in
its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. Learn
science’s name, one of countless folk names, or make up your own. To do
so is to change everything, including yourself. Because once you start
noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds
and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where
it has always been, all around you.