On February 12, staff and volunteers at the Garden’s Herbarium accessioned the 100,000th specimen into the collection.
The herbarium is a natural history collection of pressed, dried plants that are used for a multitude of purposes including basic and applied science.
The 100,000 th specimen is an Agave that was collected in Arizona by Wendy Hodson, Herbarium Curator Emerita and Senior Research Botanist at the Garden. This is the 33,795th specimen that Hodgson has collected over her 51 years as a botanist. The exciting thing about this specimen it appears to be distinct from other agaves. Research is ongoing to determine if it is a new taxon.
The value of herbarium specimens is only increasing through time, as novel uses for the specimens and specimen data emerge to address questions related to rare plants, ecology, evolution, conservation, land management, global change and more.
While herbarium specimens were collected and housed at Garden since its inception, however, it wasn’t until the late 70s that dedicated space, storage cabinets and staffing allowed the collections to really grow.
Herbarium staff, with the help of about 15 volunteers, have continued to expand the collection by adding about 3,000 new specimens to the collection each year since 2010.
The herbarium is dedicated in making the collections and associated data available to the widest possible audience.
Nearly 100% of the herbarium specimens in the collection are databased, 99% are georeferenced (i.e., they have map coordinates), and 92% have high-resolution digital images. This information has been uploaded to, and is available on, the Southwest Environmental Information Network (SEINet, https://swbiodiversity.org/seinet/). SEINet is an online specimen portal that houses over 24 million specimen records from over 450 natural history collections.
Following the Mission of the Garden and like the Living Collections, the Herbarium collections are especially strong for the Agave (Agavaceae) and Cactus (Cactaceae) Families as well as ethnobotanical (culturally important) vouchers and plants from arid regions of the world, especially Arizona, the Southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico.
Desert Botanical Garden is committed to building one of the best herbarium collections in support of its mission and is thrilled with the milestone of reaching 100,000 specimens in the herbarium’s collection.
