Missing the Herbarium

Hello Everyone,

Big news in my life: I GRADUATED! Yes, happy times. However, I do miss my work at the Herbarium a lot. I miss my plants! The good thing is i'm not quite done there yet!
I still have to finish name verifying cabinets 13 and 14 so that I can say I verified the whole collection (that's right, 26,000+ specimens, YAY!).

For now, I'm studying for my GRE and looking into grad schools! Wish me luck!

Before I go, a funny advice from the field of "Plant Psychology" (have you ever heard of that?  :)

Bye for now,

Emilie

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