Contributing specimens to the Herbarium

Contributing specimens to the Herbarium

I’ve shared photographs from my summers in the prairie fens, identifying species, collecting specimens, and encounters with wildlife. I’ve shown you how I used the Herbarium to help me identify my specimens. Now it is time I added to the collection for others to utilize in the same and new manners.

Over the course of two field seasons, I collected 1053 specimens for my Master’s Project. They filled an entire cabinet:

This cabinet contains all 1053 pressed specimens I collected in my two year project. On the bottom right are the shelves housing my field journals containing the specimen and location information I had to transcribe into a database to make my herbarium labels.

 I was able to identify 987 specimens to species (290 species total), 53 to genus, 6 to family, and 7 were unidentified. After identifying the specimens, I wasn’t done. I still had to create labels, mount, and accession them to add them to the Herbarium collection. Luckily, I didn’t have to do this alone:

Riley Zionce and Hillary Karbowski mount an Equisetum from the Prairie Fen Biodiversity Project.

Given the large number of specimens, I knew typing up herbarium labels by hand would be insanity. Many specimens were from the same site and sometimes the same area. I believe my fingers would have cramped up and fallen off if I had to repeat that information for multiple species. Plus, every keystroke I made had the possibility of typos that would be hard to spot among 1000+ labels. Instead I utilized a database:

A screen shot of the specimen collection table in my database.

I started with a specimen “Collection” table where I typed every collection number, species name, specimen description, and a plethora of other information from my field journals. Instead of typing in directions to a site for every specimen that I collected at that site, I could link all specimens to a “Sites” table where one set of directions was added for each site. I had several other tables that were also linked to each “Collection” record. When I was finished, I created a query of all the fields I would include on an Herbarium label and exported it into a Microsoft Excel document.

Next I created a mail merge document in Microsoft Word, and linked it to the fields in my query:

A screen shot of the labels form with fields linked to my collection information.

After figuring out the dimensions, font sizes, and the like to get the labels to look like I wanted them, I populated or merged my document with my collection information. There was only one more step before labels could be printed: italicize the scientific names in the merged document. Unfortunately, the limitations of the various Microsoft programs will not allow for the font styles to carry over into a merge. Luckily Hillary saved me and took on the task!

After those final edits, Hillary printed the labels, and Riley joined in the process. The two began mounting the specimens, site by site.

Hillary Karbowski and Riley Zionce mounted Symphyotrichum novae-anglae from Bridge Valley Fen, Oakland County, Michigan (North Oakland Headwaters Land Conservancy).

I don’t know about you, but I feel a great satisfaction looking at the near final product of the collection.


-Rachel H