End of Semester Thoughts

As the semester ends, I'm proud of what we Herbarians have been able to accomplish. We have completely organized Cabinets 1-13, and Cabinets 1-12 are databased and name verified. At least seven cabinets have also been annotated, and Cabinets 1-2 have been almost completely barcoded. Almost 2,000 specimens have been photographed with SilverImage.

As of December 28th, I am leaving for a research expedition to Antarctica, along with another CMU undergraduate student, Carlos Coronado, and Dr. Andrew Mahon (CMU Molecular Ecology). We will be collecting benthic invertebrates along the coast of the lonely continent. To keep up with my explorations there, you can follow Dr. Mahon's blog at http://people.cst.cmich.edu/mahon2a/MahonLab/Antarctica/Antarctica.html .    We will all be posting on a weekly basis, and our friends here in the states will be posting pictures on our behalf, as we won't have internet access or phone service until our return.

Come mid-February, I will be returning to my work in the Herbarium. Emilie will also be having her own adventures until then. Meanwhile, Adriane will be holding the fort for us! My hope is that by the end of next semester, we will be able to finish organizing, databasing, verifying, and annotating all of the cabinets. Hopefully we can also make progress with barcoding and digitizing the specimens.

A big thanks to Dr. Monfils for a wonderful semester, and for the wicked cool Herbarium hat she gave me for Christmas. I'll be sure to take lots of pictures with it in Antarctica!

Until I return!

Abigail Hollingsworth

Keeping up with the annotations

Hello everyone,

I guess the last time I described my work progress in here I was finishing to organize the monocots! Well, I am happy to let the world know that the monocots are done (annotated all specimens that needed it, organized genera alphabetically within families and families according to Voss' Michigan Flora)!
Cabinet 6, the first cabinets of the monocots, is also done! I checked all specimens that needed to be annotated from Cabinet 7 and 8 and Adriane is going to put the annotation labels this week as I verify the specimens of cabinet 9 for name changes! During the process of checking names/organizing specimens, we find very interesting things like Chara sp. specimens sitting in the middle of Fagaceae :S

I have to thank Abbie and Adriane that are organizing the cabinets beforehand so I can check the names much easier!

Hope you liked my  e-card. I'll try to post more funny memes as people seem to enjoy the "Keep Calm and Organize the Herbarium" one :D

Have a great week,

Emilie

Small Collections Herbarium Workshop and Favorite Encounters

Things have been busy in the Herbarium, and busier in the world of Academia. My classes have certainly been keeping me on my toes--and my cold has kept me attached to my kleenex box. Hence, I am ashamed to say that I have been neglecting my duties as a plant librarian scribe. Much has happened in the past few weeks. Most notably, Dr. Monfils, Emilie, and I presented at the Small Collections Herbarium Workshop hosted here at CMU on October 20th. It was a wonderful experience. I got to meet a lot of very knowledgeable, friendly Herbarians (is that a word? Or perhaps it is a special, distinct culture of people who are passionate about plants). I discovered that almost everyone had the same challenges as we did, and I also learned some of the innovations they had come up with to deal with them.

 For instance, we have decided to start barcoding right beside the specimen label instead of in the far left corner, so that when Silver Biology processes our photos to put the text in the database, they will have an easier time of double-checking that the barcode matches up with the specimen photograph.

Overall, it was really enlightening to see all of the different ways in which people had solved the same problems, especially when it came to unique approaches to databasing and organizing Herbariums of multiple sizes. I would like to think that the CMC Herbarium is making great progress, and that we were able to share some of our progress and suggestions with the other attendees of the workshop.

We have continued to march on in our efforts over the last few weeks. We have mostly been organizing, name verifying, and annotating. The first five cabinets are now completely annotated, and we have organized halfway through cabinet 9. I also made some milestones with digitization. I have barcoded almost 1,200 specimens, and the proud specimen below had the distinct honor of being the 1,000th photograph for our database:

 This Gymnocarpium dryopteris, family Woodsiaceae, had the honor of being the 1000th photograph for our Digitization Project.

I also had some interesting finds this week. First off, I would like to know whose idea this was:

Acrostichum danaeifolium

Also, when Voss leaves a note saying something was unidentifiable, you know it's true. Just like several folders of Amalanchier sp. I found this week whilst organizing Rosaceae:

Also, the Crataegus genus in Rosaceae brought some painful memories to the fore. When I was sixteen, I thought it would be a grand idea one summer to ride my bike full tilt down a steep hill. It was all fun and games and the wind in my hair until I hit the sharp corner at the bottom. I was going too fast, my brake was broken, and I wasn't able to make the turn. I ended up riding head-on into a large rock, which proceeded to catapult me into a large and rather prickly Hawthorne tree. The specimens below reminded me vividly of the four-inch thorns that ripped through my scalp and gave me a concussion that summer.

Crataegus sp.

Finally, I thought that this Argentina anserina was very prettily mounted:

More adventures in the Herbarium to follow! Until next time,

Abigail H.

Small Collections Herbarium Workshop

Hello everyone,

Last weekend we had some exciting things going on ! The CMC Herbarium hosted the "Small Collections Herbarium Workshop" here on campus. Botanists from all over Michigan and the Mid West participated in the workshop and learned a bit more about digitizing their  herbaria! Basically the wokshop passed the following message: " You can digitize your herbarium and those that did before can help you with this process."

It started at 9:00 am and went untill 6:00 pm. It was definetly a big day, but also very very informative!

Abigail and I participated on the talk " The bottle neck of pre-digitization curation: How do I prepare to digitize?" which was very exciting. It was my first time talking at a conference. I usually present posters which is a bit different :)

I talked about the process of verifying the names of the herbarium specimens! The process is detailed on the PPT slides below!

 I also talked about the lessons I learned while working in the herbarium for the past 5 months!
As you can see below, it involves a lot of learning in the field of plant systematics and taxonomy!

Thank you so much for reading our blog and have a wonderful day,

Emilie

Under the scope

I have been busy in the herbarium. I want to write about two problems that I am currently tackling. The first is determining key diagnostic characters useful in identifying and distinguishing two varieties (var. for short) of a species.  My quarry, Schoenoplectus acutus var. acutus (the autonym) and Schoenoplectus var. occidentalis are nearly indistinguishable.  S. var. occidentalis supposedly has three-parted styles and trigonous achens while the autonym has two-parted styles and plano-convex achenes.  I say supposedly, because I’ve found this trait to be unreliable among other sub-specific taxa in Schoenoplectus.  It takes an examination of several specimens to determine whether a character state is consistent or not. The CMC herbarium has specimens of both Schoenoplectus acutus varieties on loan and from field collections made by Central Michigan faculty and students.

Several specimens on loan have been annotated in the past by a recognized Cyperaceae expert. These are the specimens to really clue into to determine consistent diagnostic features. The unofficially word with these varieties… is again styles are not a reliable character as I found a three-parted style on at least one individual identified as the autonym.

The dissecting scope is a necessary tool to track down three-parted styles!

 

The second endeavor I am engaged in is to annotate all of our loaned Schoenoplectus and Schoenoplectiella specimens. Many of these specimens are from Africa and Asia and that means there is a whole new set of characters and different character states that may differentiate these taxa from each other and from the North American (N.A.) relatives. Luckily, I love learning and identification! To complicate things though, the keys and field guides are often not as well developed for these taxa as they are for the N.A. ones. So my hunt of the specimens also becomes a hunt into the literature to find the keys and species descriptions left by past botanists.

 

I learned that a handful of Schoenoplectiella species have clearly-visible septate culms (see picture below). None of the N.A. taxa display this feature. As an aside, do you see the need to examine the global diversity of a plant genus before you can adequately describe the features that encompass that genus; and the enormous time and collaboration that such a task would entail?

 

A look at septate culms

 

One key I found from a 1981 paper was helpful but the author had only examined species from Australia. When I pulled from the cabinet other similar species that did not occur in Australia I found that what I would have identified as one species was actually one of these newly pulled species. It came down to the number of wrinkles on the achenes! It may seem that adding more species to the mix might confuse things but the opposite is actually true; only when I had all of the known Schoenoplectiella species with septate culms from around the globe was I able to confidently distinguish the [6] distinct taxa.

Happy ID’ing

Derek

Prairie Fens of Michigan

Prairie Fens of Michigan

All of the plants that Hillary and I collected came from prairie fens in southern Michigan. Once finished with identity confirmations, over 800 new specimens will be added to the CMC Herbarium. We even have a few specimens that did not have any representation in the CMC Herbarium yet.

We traveled to ten prairie fens across five counties to collect our specimens. We visited the sites two times: once in late spring, the other in late summer. The sites looked very different between two periods with completely different plants in bloom: In spring, Carex sp., some grasses, and a select few dicots (Figure 1); in later summer, Asteraceae and practically everything else (Figure 2).

Figure 1. In a sedge meadow of a prairie fen in Oakland County, Michigan, in June the Carex sp., other Cyperaceae, and Poaceae show their dominance. White cedar (Thuja occidentalis) and tamarack (Larix laricina) thickets surround the sedge meadow. A stand of the invasive narrow-leafed cattail (Typha angustifloia) is spreading across the central stream.

Figure 2. Above is the same prairie fen of Oakland County, Michigan, in August. The sedge meadow zone of a prairie fen blooms in many different colors. In this photograph many wildflowers – Eutrochium maculatum, Eupatorium perfoliatum, Solidago - are blooming amongst the dominant sedges (Cyperaceae) and grasses (Poaceae). A few Asclepias species (A. syriaca in the foreground on the left) are also seen in sedge meadows. On the left in the middle-ground are a few dogwood shrubs (Cornus), and in the background are tamarack (Larix laricina) and white cedar (Thuja occidentalis) trees. Beware: Poison sumac shrubs (Toxicodendron vernix) are also common in prairie fens. This photograph was taken at a prairie fen in Oakland County, Michigan.

Prairie fens are a groundwater-fed wetlands dominated by grasses, sedges, and asters, found mostly in the glaciated Midwest. They are one of the most diverse ecosystems in the temperate region. These wetlands also are often source waters for major rivers: the Grand River, Shiawassee River, and River Raisin all begin in prairie fens. Fen existence also helps reduce the effects of global climate! Since prairie fens are fed by a nearly constant source of groundwater, they are wet almost all year long. All this groundwater reduces the rate of decomposition, so carbon and other compounds are trapped in the dead vegetative matter.

There are many different vegetation zones in the fens, each housing a different assortment of species. Typically sedge meadow zones cover the greatest area of a prairie fen (Figures 1 & 2). Sedge meadows are dominated by Cyperaceae, usually Carex sp. and contain many flowering dicots, mostly Asteraceae, and Poaceae, commonly big blue stem (Andropogen gerardii) and Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans). Shrubs and small trees (Rosaceae, Cornus, and Toxicodendron vernix) are also common in sedge meadows.

Inundated flat is the zone near lakes and streams usually dominated by sedges (Cyperaceae) with few other small species (Figure 3). In times of heavy precipitation the inundated flat can become flooded. Walking in these zones is often “bouncy” because there is a mat of dead, non-decomposed vegetation you walk on. Sometimes these mats have more water than soil beneath them. These are the zones you may suddenly sink up to your thigh and not feel a bottom, only water and mud in your boot.

  

Figure 3. An inundated flat is a wet zone bordering lakes and streams dominated by Cyperaceae species (upper left). Clockwise from the top are some common and dominant species of inundated flat: Schoenoplectus sp. and Cladium mariscoides, on the lower right Eleocharis elliptica, and on the lower left a mat of Eleocharis rostellata around a Sagittaria latifolia plant and other sedges.

A calcareous groundwater seep is where a spring is allowing the groundwater to seep directly to the surface (Figure 4). These areas are wet all year round and are typically nitrogen and phosphorus poor. Carnivorous plants and other common bog species are found in this area of the prairie fen since it is lacking in nitrogen and phosphorus. Some prairie fens lack these zones; in others the seep may span acres; in others there are several small pockets with no one more than 25 square feet.

Figure 4. The calcareous groundwater seepage zone of a prairie fen is another possible zone of prairie fens that contains many unique and specialized species. In the photograph on the top are shrubby cinquefoil (Dasiflora fruticosa), bog lobelia (Lobelia kamlii), sageleaf willow (Salix candida), Equisetum scirpoides, Carex sterilis, Carex flava, and Schoenoplectus acutus. Below are other seepage inhabitants: left, roundleaf sundew (Drosera rotundifolia) and, right, purple pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea).

The wooded prairie fen zone is commonly along the edge of the prairie fen, transitioning the wetland into upland habitat (Figure 5). Some are dominated by tamarack (Larix laricina), other white cedar (Thuja occidentalis) or red cedar (Juniperus virginiana). One sure thing is that they are smelly: Skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) is a common and sometimes dominating species in wooded prairie fen zones.

Figure 5. A wooded prairie fen zone is still dominated by sedges, grasses, and asters, but has a canopy layer and other more shady wetland species like skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus). The most common tree species of wooded prairie fen is tamarack (Larix laricina, a sapling pictured right). Other species include poison sumac (Toxicodendron vernix), dogwood (Cornus spp.), white cedar (Thuja occidentalis), red maple (Acer rubra), and willow (Salix spp.).

 

As you can see, prairie fen communities are very diverse. The specimens we collected will support our field identification of the plant species for our theses and papers. A great specimen must have all the plant parts, including the roots (a tough job with some Carex and wetland species). These specimens must be pressed and dried for at least two weeks and frozen in a no-frost freezer to prevent insect and mold contamination of the Herbarium collection. For more information on collecting see the CMC Herbarium website (http://cmcherbarium.bio.cmich.edu/collections.html). After confirmation of species identity and properly mounted and labeled, they will be submitted to the Herbarium as specimens.

Rachel

Photos by Hillary Karbowski and Rachel Hackett

Science and Trouble-shooting

The last few weeks have found me working on a variety of projects in the Herbarium. I have been helping Emilie organize the cabinets prior to annotation, instead of during/after, and we have found that it is a far more efficient process. I am sure that all Herbariums, or libraries, for that matter, have the issues that we came face-to-face with these last few weeks. It was alarming to me to discover that within our Juncaceae shelves, (in fact, within most of the families) nothing was organized alphabetically or even by species. Specimens had been placed randomly back in the correct family, but not in the correct genus or species folders. Emilie had discovered this same problem within Cabinet 3 and 4, which is why it took so long to organize and annotate the monocots, especially since she was working alone then.

So, Adriane and I have begun dedicating part of our week to organizing the cabinets prior to Emilie's name-checks and annotations. Even though it means handling the specimens slightly more, it makes the entire process go by faster and more smoothly. This is especially because we encountered huge stacks of specimens that were completely unaccessioned. Without accession numbers, the specimens cannot be placed in our database, nor can they be tracked in any way. In the last two weeks, I must have accessioned at least three hundred specimens, just within Cabinet 5!

I also spent the last two weeks learning more of the ups and downs of the digitization process. We had some trouble with the software, but Michael Giddens was an invaluable help, and now I can proceed with my photographing. I was not bothered by the early software glitches, since it is a brand new program, and we are some of the first guinea pigs to use it. I am gaining more confidence with the software as I realize that it is actually fairly difficult to make a mistake with the photographing itself. The software warns me if I take two photographs without scanning a barcode, or if I scan the same barcode twice. I found the overwrite feature of the software particularly helpful last week, because I had to rephotograph multiple specimens, and I was petrified that I might have to wade through the computer's hard-drive, trying to delete the correct photos before I could retake them. With Michael's help, however, I discovered that the overwrite is extremely easy. You simply rephotograph the specimen, rescan it, and a box pops up letting you know that the barcode is already in the database and associated with a photo. You tell it to overwrite the previous photo, and the deed is done.

I can see such a feature coming in very  handy in the future. I am learning that science, and especially systematics, is an extremely recursive, dynamic process. The phylogenies of plants and their organization--even their names--are constantly evolving.This is especially true because of the recent advances in genetics and technology. The easy overwrite feature will make it simple to rephotograph specimens in the future if they have had to be annotated or re-accessioned for any reason.

Although the last two weeks have been full of trouble-shooting, they have also been very informative, and I have confidence that Emilie, Adriane, and I will continue to discover more efficient ways of completing our mission: the complete reorganization and digitization of 25,000 specimens.

Until next time,

Abigail H.

Organizing and Annotating the Monocots!

Hello Everyone,

Thanks for visiting out Blog!

During the past couple of weeks, I have been working heavily on organizing and annotating the Monocots we have here at the Herbarium!

Our Monocots take up 3 cabinets here at CMC and they are the most challenging group to organize for some reasons:

1. Within the Monocots we have the families Cyperaceae, Poaceae and Juncaceae. These 3 families are very big, meaning they have looooots of genera and species!
2. A lot of name changes happened recently (Scirpus is one good example. Many species of this genus were transfered to Schoenoplectus and other genera!) in such families.
3. At last, our 3 monocots cabinets were a bit unorganized, in a way that we had many specimens of different species in the same folders and everywhere in the cabinet.

I also found many specimens that needed to be accessioned already filled in the collection.

All of these things slow down our organizing process a lot, but I am happy to tell the world that two of these cabinets are down and we "only" have one more to go!

A big thank to Adriane and Abbie that helped during many steps of the organization process!

Until next post,

Emilie

Digitization Proceeds

The last two weeks, I began working on the process of digitizing the Herbarium's 25,000 specimens. During digitization, the photos begin as raw images associated with barcodes, and they must be converted to JPEG form before they are browser-friendly. This conversion can take hours, depending on how many photographs you have taken that day. For this reason, it has become taboo to ever shut down the digitization computer, in case the program is still working on batching out images from the previous session. I had a bit of a scare after my first session, when the digitization computer insisted that it needed to shut down for updates. So, I finished batching out the 165 photographs that I had just taken and restarted the computer manually, so that it would not turn itself off in the middle of the program while I was not there.

Unfortunately, when I logged back on, the programs were not there, and neither were my photographs. I will not lie to you: I was a bit stricken with terror at that. Luckily, the problem was a simple one: the programs were only accessible through a specific username and password for the computer. Our amazing Biology department technology staff helped me out, and this week I was up and running again.

Now that we have ironed the process out, it is incredibly easy and fast. First, I go through the cabinet and I barcode every specimen (preferably in the same order in which they are stored, so that the barcodes are sequential...this helps to keep track of them once photographing begins). I also double-check the organization and make sure that all specimens have been annotated and accessioned. I do this during a work shift ahead of time, so that photographing runs smoothly.

After prep, the actually photographing is easy. I turn on the camera and the lights, open the imaging programs, log in, and open the correct project. I remove an entire shelf of specimens from the cabinet, and I organize them so that there are separate piles for folders whose specimens have been taken, are about to be taken, or are being taken.

 I simply place a specimen on the photographing deck:

Then, I make sure that within the SilverImage program, the cursor is within the green barcoding space:

Then, I use the hand remote to take a photograph.

 

Next, I run the barcode of the specimen that I just photographed under the scanner:

And that's it! That specimen is now a high-resolution raw image, and is now associated with its very own barcode. After I am done photographing for the day, there is a protocol for editing and "batching out" the images, which converts them from raw data to JPEG format and transfers them to their final home on the hard drive. This process is easy, though, once you get the hang of it. The programs are pretty intuitive, and I do not usually have to even look at my protocol to remind myself. I have only done a few short photography sessions so far, and yet I have photographed nearly 400 specimens. Plus, that was before I had really gotten the hang of it. I am sure that from now on, barring any mistakes on my part, I should be flying through the cabinets!

Until next time,

Abigail

 

Where do the plants come from?

Where do the plant specimens come from?

This blog is all about the Herbarium, but how does the Herbarium come across all these fascinating plants to share with the world? That is where we come in:

Figure 1. Hillary and Rachel, prairie fen fanatics and student researchers.

Specimens are usually contributed to the CMC Herbarium by students who take plant-related classes, student researchers, and professors, but anyone can collect given they know and follow State and Federal laws and acquire the proper permits. This summer Hillary, a junior at CMU, and I, a graduate researcher, set out to study the wide diversity of the plants of prairie fens.

We visited ten different prairie fens in south-central Michigan and collected over 800 voucher specimens. These specimens will support our field identification of the plant species for our theses and papers. A great specimen must have all the plant parts, including the roots (a tough job with some Carex and wetland species). These specimens must be pressed and dried for at least two weeks and frozen in a no-frost freezer to prevent insect and mold contamination of the Herbarium collection. For more information on collecting see the CMC Herbarium website (http://cmcherbarium.bio.cmich.edu/collections.html). After confirmation of species identity and properly mounted and labeled, they will be submitted to the Herbarium as specimens.

Figure 2. On the top is the specimen of Scirpus atrovirens in the field. It was pressed, dried, and frozen (bottom left). After a confirmation of its identity, an herbarium label will be printed and the specimen will be mounted and catalogued in the CMC Herbarium (bottom right).

 

Figure 3. The common elderberry (Sambucus canadensis) was collected (top), pressed (bottom left), and will be labeled and mounted (bottom right). When pressing, it is important to make sure that all leave surfaces and many different angles of flowers and fruits are showing, because once a specimen is dried, it is very delicate and breaks easily.

Traveling to all of the different prairie fens and watching the plants come into bloom was amazing. Hillary and I learned to identify so many new wetland and prairie species. With the Herbarium, we can share all of our beautiful plants with others.

Rachel

Photos by Rachel Hackett and Hillary Karbowski.

A fresh start and a familiar task

Wow, is it good to be back at school and starting work again in the herbarium. It really feels like a whole new place (thanks to all of the hard work Dr. Monfils, Emilie and Abigail put in over the summer). I’m on board and ready to make some changes to the ways in which I am used to doing herbarium tasks however, I am happy to begin my work with the familiar task of mounting specimens.

I’m picking up right where I left off, mounting specimens from Dr. Monfils’ wetland plants course that is usually taught once per year. One of the many things that the students in wetland plants learn is the process of collecting and identifying specimens. The students travel to many places around Michigan to collect. Once the specimens have been collected, they should be pressed and all of the necessary information (e.g. locality, family name, species, collector and collection number) should be included before handing them over to be mounted. This should be done ASAP before all of the information is forgotten!

One of the most interesting parts about mounting specimens is trying to get the pressed specimens to fit just perfectly on the special herbarium mounting paper. It is very amusing to find that a collector’s point of view on a properly pressed specimen is quite different than that of the one mounting the specimens. When mounting, I am hopeful that a collector will have deposited a specimen to the herbarium that has the most information in the least amount of space. It is a challenging task to fit a specimen (with as many identifying characteristics as possible), label, herbarium stamp, accession number, and envelope all on to one sheet! Here are some of the photos from the mounting process.

As I was mounting, I captured some of the steps and the equiptment:

Here is a collage of my favorites that I mounted today:

Thanks for reading!

My Best,

Adriane Shorkey

A place for research

Around two years ago I had little comprehension of herbaria, let alone appreciation and respect for their value. I’ve grown up collecting things and have loved observing different species of plants and animals, but working in a place that is home to a diverse collection of plants never crossed my mind as I imagined myself as a scientist. My name is Derek; I am not a CMC herbarium employee like Emilie, rather, I am a user of the herbarium. My use of the herbarium as a graduate student will be the primary subject of my blog entries.

I was approached over a year ago by a professor (who teachers an introductory biology class over the summer) who asked if I would give a short presentation to his class about the herbarium. I agreed, but never wrote any reminder down. Two summer’s in a row now, while working in the herbarium, here comes his class filing in—ready to listen to my spiel. I’ve been amazed each time by how excited I have been about the herbarium and dry, dead plants in my off-the-cuff expose. Herbaria have become for me a great research tool and I love research. I have discovered that the dead plants come alive with facts and data about a species, a region of the state, country or world, a collector or a time period.  I just counted again to be sure—I have loans of herbarium specimens from 16 different herbaria! Now, when I say “I” what I actually mean is Dr. Monfils—CMC Director— has requested specimens on my behalf for my research and the lab’s biodiversity research on Schoenoplectus and Schoenoplectiella. Herbaria from all over the world will loan specimens for research to other herbaria, but these loans must take place between a dedicated curator who can be responsible for their safe keeping. Some of the specimens we have from the New York Botanical Garden and the Missouri Botanical Garden were collected from countries scattered across the globe. I need to spend more time with these specimens and I will write about that next time.

-Derek

New working peers at the Herbarium!

Hello all,

The fall semester started some weeks ago and it has been very busy already! I am taking 14 credits this semester, doing an undergraduate research and keeping up with work at the Herbarium!


Luckily, two new women were hired to work at the Herbarium which makes it more pleasant to work in! I worked pretty much by myself all summer and it is refreshing to have people to talk to and to share the work with!

The new workers are Abigail (Abbie) and Adriane and both of them have good work ethics and are organized. They are also always willing to help me, which is great.

One week before school started, I introduced Abbie to the Herbarium and taught her how to database the cabinets we had left (take note of the numbers of specimens of each species we have). Remember, Ashli was working on that earlier in the summer? She was able to database cabinets 4 to 9, and Abbie is continuing this work (we have 14 cabinets full of specimens)! I also taught her how to annotate specimens!

Just a reminder on why this step is necessary

I need to know how many specimens of each species we have, so then I can name verify each species (see if the scientific name was changed, or if a certain genus changed families or if a family name changed) to then produce annotation labels and annotate the specimens!

Here it is a small summary of the process:

(1) Database Cabinets
(2) Name verify species for name changes

(3) Produce the right amount of annotation labels
(4) Annotate specimens or correct the names

(5) Organize cabinets according to Edward G. Voss’ Michigan Flora 2nd edition which contains 3 volumes

(6) Re-folder specimens
(7) Produce Genus and Specimens labels for the folders using a label maker
(8) DIGITIZE!!

I have posts written in each of these topics, so you can always go back and check them in more detail!

Adriane has worked at the Herbarium before for a long time! So, she already knew many details about the Herbarium. She is our mounting specialist and she is working on mounting specimens from classes taught by Anna. She also helps me with annotating specimens when our working times overlap!

Lately, I have been working on annotating specimens from Cabinet 3 (YEAA, Cabinets 1 and 2 are fully annotated and organized!!) and name verifying some other cabinets! I am leaving in December, when I graduate, and I have to finish name verifying all cabinets before that because it was a hard and very time consuming process to learn!

Overall, it has been a pleasure working in group. I feel that the 3 of us are doing a good job on communicating where we are at and what our next steps will be.

Thanks for reading!

Emilie

Digitization

Last week was mostly spent databasing our tenth and eleventh cabinets and returning newly accessioned specimens to their proper homes. On Friday, however, our humble (but worthy) Herbarium reached a new stepping stone in the digitization process. Dr. Monfils and I had a video conference with Michael Giddens, who was kind enough to give us a detailed walkthrough of how to go about barcoding, photographing, and digitizing our specimens using our new SilverImage software. It seems like it will be a very efficient and easy process once we get in the swing of things. The high resolution photos that we have taken so far are looking gorgeous!

In layman's terms, we are giving each specimen in our Herbarium a sequential barcode (much like each specimen has an accession number); we photograph each specimen and then immediately scan its barcode. This barcode will then be associated with that image within the database. The photos begin as raw images and at the end of each day, we easily edit the pictures in bulk and then we "Batch out," converting the images to browser-friendly JPegs that can then be uploaded to online databases. For now, the online database will just have the image and the barcode of each specimen. Later, the high-resolution photos will allow us to add detailed information about each specimen to its entry within the database without having to actually pull the specimen from the cabinets.

I have just finished writing up the protocol for the process, and I will spend this week preparing specimens by double-checking organization and adding barcodes to the specimens in Cabinet 1. This Thursday, I will begin imaging in earnest. I am honored to be a part of pioneering this process, and I cannot wait to get started!

Again, my thanks go out to Michael Giddens, for his awesome tech support and his patient teaching as our Herbarium enters into this modern age. For a closer look at the equipment that we will be using for this process, see Mr. Giddens' website at SilverBiology: http://www.silverbiology.com/.

Until next week,

Abigail H.

Preservation in the face of Radicans

As I delved back into the cabinets this week, I found some stunning specimens. Some impressed me because they were so well pressed, such as this Parnassia glauca, or the American grass of Parnassus (family Saxifragaceae).

Other specimens impressed me because they had maintained their coloration so beautifully despite their age. For instance, take this Polygala paucifolia, or Fringed polygala (Family Polygalaceae) pressed in 1986. Look how its purplish hue has remained intact!

My most exciting finds of the week, however, were specimens from Central Michigan University's original Herbarium. Some even had the original labels, written by hand with an ink pen!

Saxifraga pennsylvanica, or Swamp Saxifrage (Family Saxifragaceae)

This Swamp Saxifrage was collected May 28, 1927!

 

 

I was impressed with this specimen, but even more impressed when I found these two samples, pressed in 1906:

Euphorbia cyparissias, or Cypress spurge (Family Euphorbiaceae)

 

 

Euphorbia polygonifolia, or Seaside spurge (Family Euphorbiaceae)

 

I hope to continue finding fascinating pieces of history like this...and I hope I look that good when I am over 100 years old.

 

 

And, finally, I worked a lot this week within the family Anacardiaceae. This family includes more innocuous species, like Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina), but it also contains Poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans), Poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum ), and Poison sumac (Toxicodendron vernix ). Thus, my hat goes off to whomever collected those fine specimens. I hope you did not suffer afterwards.

 

Toxicodendron radicans (Poison Ivy)

 





 

 Until next time,

Abigail H.