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
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