it’s extremely common in my experience for herbaria to accept specimens from individual collectors, but it depends on the focus of the institution. MOR (The Morton Arboretum) “specialises” on Chicago-region plants… so any plants from the Chicago region are fair game. you just have to find the right place that may be interested.
3 Likes
There was some discussion of herbaria in this thread: When you no longer want your accumulated nature stuff - Nature Talk - iNaturalist Community Forum
1 Like
I agree, the W.A (state) Herbarium will probably take specimens from just about anyone although whether they retain them or not depends on how useful they are*.
*This is assuming that they are submitted as unfunded id and Incorporation.
2 Likes
I suspect some of the Greater Antillean herbaria in, uh, less functional countries are in similar parlous case. It looks like IAPT issues some small collections grants to help make some of these herbaria less dysfunctional, but when the surrounding society has broken down sufficiently, it’s going to be pretty hard to maintain any kind of complex infrastructure.
LE has actually been grinding away scanning things and I know I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find a number of their fern types digitized, so I think a request there would not be a futile endeavor.
1 Like
Excel strikes me as sufficient for a personal collection. You’re presumably not trading for a bunch of material you didn’t collect, so you might even be able to integrate it with your label-making functionality (MS Office will let you drive a mail merge template with an Excel spreadsheet). If it’s more or less clearly laid out, I would think a collections manager would be able to upload from the spreadsheet in bulk into their own database software.
2 Likes
I second the use of Excel or any spreadsheet program for documenting a personal collection. I use it for all my own specimens even including those I have donated to MOR or F — as Chris says, it’s also easy to make labels using Excel and the Word “mail merge” function, and it’s easy for others to import into their system, so that would also recommend a basic spreadsheet. I attempted to switch to Microsoft Access as a more formal database structure at one point, but never got around to it as a basic csv or xls file is simpler for the less tech-savvy like me.
I’m in turn pleasantly surprised just to hear this! I’ll have to look up who to contact there then.
1 Like
How do they get they specimens in those herbaria then? When I found something that must be recorded with a herbarium specimen, because it is a notable occurence, I absolutely do bring it to a local university herbarium straight away. I do not even make it a perfect mount at home, I just dry it in newspapers, attach a paper with the metadata and bring it to the herbarium.
There is little point in gathering evidence for notable finds in an individual herbarium at home. Also, a specialist can easlily review it at the university herbarium. They now severly lack space but they they anyway do accept good material.
1 Like
just to clarify, i’m not questioning that an herbarium would accept unmounted voucher specimens here and there from trusted botanists and other folks associated with the herbarium (and familiar with the standards of the herbarium). i was thinking more that they would pass on a private herbarium that some random individual was trying to get rid of. i could be wrong, but i always figured that specimens mounted with methods potentially different from those of the herbarium and collected with potentially unknown standards would generally be of not much interest to an herbarium, unless there was something particularly notable about the collection. i wasn’t trying to discourage creating a personal herbarium, but i’m thinking that if there was interest in donating that work to science, it would be better to put that effort – at least some of it – to doing the work at a professional herbarium.
2 Likes
Yes, and beyond that, when I was a TA, 99.9% of the collections botany students created for class were returned to them because they weren’t useful. It’s not even that they were mounted poorly or had errors in the labeling, they just were duplicates of existing records. I know I sound like a huge debbie downer, but I also am concerned about the potential for a private collector to take threatened species, or to damage a sensitive habitat, for the sake of something that will have little value to anyone but them.
By volunteering for an existing herbarium, though, a collector could be sent on targeted assignments that have a real impact. I always advocate for doing that! Herbaria need enthusiastic people willing to get their hands dirty and do hard work, and money is tight.
3 Likes
just a random thought, but maybe a way to approach a personal herbarium is to do stuff that a regular herbarium would never do. just for example, instead of mounting on a plain herbarium sheet, maybe turn that sheet into some papercut art, incorporating the pressed plant(s) in an interesting way, and then instead of keeping it locked away in a box or cabinet, maybe frame it and display it behind some UV-protective clear acrylic? that’s the sort of thing that i think both science folks and non-science folks could appreciate and get joy from. and if that process was documented in a series of online videos, i think that would be interesting to a broad audience, too.
2 Likes
Those are wonderful!
(Take only photos, leave only footprints, let the wild flower in peace not pieces)