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| John Peter Thompson looking at Persicaria perfoliata (P. perfoliatum), mile-a-minute vine, accession sheets from 1964 at Norton Brown Herbarium, College Park, Maryland. April 2012 |
I had
the great privilege to visit the Norton Brown herbarium located for the time
being at the University of Maryland. The Norton Brown Collection is fortunate
to actually have a home for we live in a time when archival collections are
being discarded for reasons of space, cost and erroneous assumptions about the
state and condition of the infrastructure of knowledge that supports our life
styles and civilization. The Norton Brown Herbarium stands as a lonely sentinel
against the idea that everything you need to know is on the internet.
Just
what is an herbarium? In one sense it is a library with pages, sheets, of
information about the ecosystems and landscapes in which we live, breathe and
feed ourselves. Because our actions and our ideas live through time,
understanding change means story information about the past in the present so
that we can communicate the changes to the future. An herbarium is a collection
of pressed, dried plant specimens that are used by researchers to further
understanding of the plant world - a world that provides food, fuel, fiber,
feed, forage, flowers and forests for our use.
So now
we know what an herbarium is, why should we care that they are left for the
most part underfunded and in many cases abandoned. Unlike Norton Brown, many
systematic collections are being left to wither away uncared for. Administrators
pushed by a taxpaying public that does not know what it is losing are
"saving money" at the expense of tomorrow's storehouse of
information. The identification of the majority of organisms (insects, plants,
fungi and microorganisms) requiring expert skills for correct identification
have not been categorized or given formal scientific names. The inability to
identify (or obtain identifications of) species is a major component of the
taxonomic impediment to management of a sustainable, resilient ecosystems. We don't
fund the curation and support needed to maintain and enhance the functions of
collections; we pretend there is nothing left to know when for the most part what
we do not know about life on earth is larger than what we do know.
Think
about a visit to Norton Brown or to your local herbarium. Write the administrative
decision maker and your local politicians and tell them you want them to not
only continue to begrudgingly allow the collections to exist, but you want
increased support. Work with non profits to find private partners who are
willing to invest in the next generation's ability to make informed polity
decision about the world of life in which they will live. We must start
repairing and enhancing the infrastructure that supports education and policy;
we must fund the collections of knowledge built yesterday so that tomorrow a
new generation will have the information it needs to make beneficial life choices.
[1]
"Trained at Kansas State University by the famed agrostologist Albert S.
Hitchcock, he arrived at the Maryland Agricultural College, then an all male
student body, in the summer of 1901 and assumed a position with the Maryland
Agricultural Experiment Station (known
today as BARC) and the just formed Department of Botany. As the taxonomist
for the State of Maryland, he replaced Frank Lamson-Scribner who was also
employed by the U. S. Department of Agriculture... When Norton retired in 1942,
he was succeeded by Russell G. Brown (1905-1996), a plant physiologist. With
the arrival in the late 1960s of Drs. William L. Stern and James L. Reveal, the
herbarium was revived. In 1973, Dr. C. Rose Broome was added to the staff. With
the departure of Stern and Broome in the late 1970s, Dr. Steven R. Hill was
hired as curator in 1979, and for five years the herbarium was properly curated
and managed with Reveal serving at the Director of the Herbarium. In 1986, Dr.
Hollis G. Bedell was appointed acting curator and held the position until late
1986. By 1981, the herbarium had grown to over 35,000 specimens and by 1988
some 60,000 sheets. Today, the herbarium contains some 70,000 sheets
Except for the brief period when Hill was curator, the
Norton-Brown Herbarium, so named by the Board of Regents in 1982, received no
budgeted funding, although in 1987, the University purchased ten herbarium
cases which, coupled with several cases donated to the Herbarium by the
Smithsonian Institution, allows the facility today to adequately house its
collections. " [accessed April 13, 2012] http://www.plantsystematics.org/reveal/pbio/WWW/mary.html
[2] Ibid.
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