herbaria

[Robin W. Scribailo]

Three years ago I established a small herbarium here at Purdue North
Central. The herbarium is "The Aquatic Vascular Plant Herbarium" and is
involved only in collecting and cataloging wetland and true aquatic plants
(but also including Charophytes and some mosses and liverworts). We have
mainly been surveying lakes and wetlands in Northwest Indiana.
There has been a great deal of interest in this herbarium from government
such as DNR, IDEM (Indiana Dept of Environmental Management) and Army Corp
trying to make sound decisions on permit applications on lakes and in
wetlands but often having little information to go on in terms of diversity
or locations of rare plant populations. We have a very extensive
collections of books and manuals on aquatic plant identification and assist
in identifications or allow people to come in and use the herbarium as a
resource.
All work is done voluntarily by myself, undergraduate students or by my
Ph.D student. The collection is augmented from my research but also by
collections of my students for Aquatic Botany and Wetland Ecology courses.
We are hoping depending upon funding to make our data available on the web
with keys, maps etc.., so that it will be easier for state and federal
officials to identify imperiled species. The problem with the majority of
popularized manuals is that they often only show the more common species
and we hope to provide more detailed "user friendly" information on how to
distinguish common from rare species.
The points I am trying to make relate to several recent issues.
Firstly, the value of the herbarium in our case is not only useful for
learning through student involvement and for courses but offers some very
positive benefits to potential conservation efforts to the state. Often
state and federal officials must rely on herbaria to provide them with
relevant information.
I have my own consulting firm which does wetland creation, mitigation and
permitting. When permit applications come out from DNR and IDEM and Army
Corp for public notice I try to provide information to these agencies
regarding projects that might threaten diversity or individual species from
herbarium records and the database.
I see this as a greater and greater role for herbaria and think our
herbarium has found a unique niche for itself in Indiana. It is frustrating
that we are on a total shoe string budget (relying on plant sales to
provide money for herbarium paper etc..,) and do not receive funds for
identification work. Unfortunately(?), NSF and other granting agencies are
heading more towards providing the widest possible dissemination of
information.
With our locality data for rare aquatics we seldom are likely to have to
worry about individuals "running off" with a rare Potamogeton for personal
use but whether this information is released on the web would have to be
evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Robin
Dr. Robin Scribailo
Associate Professor of Biology
Biological Sciences and Chemistry Section
Purdue University North Central
1401 S. US 421, Westville
IN 46391-9528
(219) 785-5255