Housed in the basement of the Clare Small building听is a treasure trove of more than 550,000 plant specimens: the CU Museum Herbarium.
Unless you're a botanist-in-training, this听collection听probably isn't听on your radar. But herbarium听professionals听are听leading the charge in听a years-long听project focused on digitizing plant specimens from the southern Rocky Mountain region.
The goal of this project is to mobilize collections across 39 institutions听to make them accessible to scientists, educators, land managers and the public. With collections dating back more than a century, making the data accessible will enable closer study that may help track future environmental changes and their effects.
The digital collections, available to the public on their website, offer critical information to researchers on climate change. When you map out a specimen's distribution pattern over time, trends can be seen in fluctuating resources in a given elevational band鈥攚hether there鈥檚 more or less water, and if plants are migrating to higher bands in order to stay alive. This information can also inform the status of local pollinators and other fauna.
While the data is crucial to researchers,听going out into the field and experiencing the human side of things鈥攇etting back to engagement with the world on an elemental level鈥攃an be just as beneficial听and a reminder of why the work is done in the first place.听Last summer, the Boulder team organized a workshop introducing students to museum specimen collecting, preparation and digitization.
Community outreach
The team's first workshop weekend at San Juan College in Farmington, New Mexico, with field sites on Navajo land,听exposed participants to potential museum careers and provided a more hands-on experience with collecting and imaging specimens. Participants were drawn from all over the southern Rocky Mountain region鈥攆rom San Juan College, Northern Arizona University, Black Hills State University听and even Washington state. Some participants were previously associated with the project, while others were new to the craft鈥攔ecruited specifically for this event.
鈥淲e felt it was really important to try to involve smaller colleges and smaller collections where maybe there weren鈥檛 as many opportunities as there are at CU,鈥� said Ryan Allen, project manager of biodiversity informatics at the CU Museum and project coordinator for Southern Rocky Mountain Thematic Collections Network (TCN).
The highlight of the workshop was a lecture by Navajo botanist Arnold Clifford, who offered a nuanced approach to thinking about native plants and landscapes as scientific objects as well as botanical resources. For student-participants who identified as Native, the workshop took on cultural significance.听
鈥淲e were out in the field, and Arnold not only was telling us the scientific name, but also the name in Navajo and how its used. I think people just sort of hung on his words,鈥� said Dina Clark, collections manager of botany for the CU Museum. 鈥淸As a botanist] I get caught up in genus and species, but there are other ways to look at a plant, and I think for me that was really wonderful.鈥�
鈥淲e walk through this world all the time not noticing a thing that鈥檚 around us. Stop, look and listen. Describe where you are. Just being an observer is the first step to being a scientist, to just being engaged in our world,鈥� said Clark.听
After a successful first outreach project, Clark and Allen express desire to do it all again.
鈥淚 think it鈥檚 something that can be used as a model to get more people involved in museums, fieldwork and the importance of collections,鈥� said Allen.
鈥淵ou don鈥檛 necessarily have to be a botanist or a scientist to appreciate a lot of the work that comes out of these iDigBio projects and collections.鈥�
