📢#OutNow in #OA: '#Decolonial #Ecologies: The Reinvention of #NaturalHistory in #LatinAmerican #Art', by Joanna Page.

In this book, Joanna Page illuminates the ways in which #contemporary #artists in #LatinAmerica are reinventing #historical methods of collecting, organizing, and displaying nature in order to develop new #aesthetic and #political perspectives on the past and the present.

Page brings together an entirely new corpus of #artistic projects from #Argentina, #Brazil, #Chile, #Colombia, #Ecuador, #Mexico, and #Peru that engage critically and creatively with forms as diverse as the #medieval #bestiary, #baroque #cabinetsofcuriosities, atlases created by #European travellers to the #NewWorld, the #floras and #herbaria composed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century #naturalists, and the #dioramas designed for #naturalhistory #museums.

Access this OA title for free or get a hard copy at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0339

https://www.uidaho.edu/sci/news/vandal-science/october-2019/stillinger_herbarium

University of Idaho in Moscow may soon be looking for an Herbarium collections manager. Very interesting!

#nativeplants #herbaria #botany #plantjobs #academia

I'm giving an #herbarium talk today at The Morton Arboretum (my home institution). It's about the importance of #herbaria and #specimens, and a vision possible next directions.

Including a link here in case you are interested and to hear your thoughts. Some of these are institution-specific, but the questions we're addressing in the #museum world and the worlds of #informalScienceEducation and #scicomm intersect. I'd love to hear how this overlaps with your ideas.

https://tinyurl.com/MORherb2023

Landing page for the 30 Special Feature papers across the British Ecological Society journals. Overseeing the plant papers in Journal of Ecology was a lot of fun. I love to see good use being made of #herbaria

Leveraging natural history collections to understand the impacts of global change

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/leveraging_natural_history?=

New paper out with postdoc Amanda Wu (https://awu-blog.weebly.com/) on morphological and #genomic distinctiveness of IUCN-#endangered maple-leaf oak (Quercus acerifolia). Uses #botanicGardens to account for #plasticity, #herbaria to cover range, and random #field sampling. Findings:

1. Q. acerifolia is distinct, weakly differentiated from Q. shumardii.

2. Herbarium samples are biased against morphological intermediates.

So: good #species ?

#oaks #taxonomy #conservation

https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.18777

#Herbaria are not just about #plants but also about #history. #CuratorLife is also about learning about collectors. Today, I solved the mystery of a collector from India, "Col. R.S. Vine". It's Roland Stephen Vine (1910-2003). He was with the #RAMC, the Royal Army Medical Corps, and stationed in India between 1936 and 1939. That's when we have his collections from India from. But he also collected in the UK and Greece but those collections are in Kew #Herbarium.

RT @QuaveEthnobot@twitter.com

Hey #botany peeps! Have any of you ever seen a plant press like this before?? So cool! #herbarium #herbaria #plants #Science #naturalhistory #biology

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/QuaveEthnobot/status/1605140113012441088

#Museum30 Day 26 - ‘Colleague'
Today, I'd like to use the occasion to give a shout out to all dear #curator colleagues in #museums and #herbaria who take care of the human heritage, discover new aspects, help to interpret it, make #exhibitions happen and share the cool things to know, often with little pay and much pressure. #museodon

#Museum30 Day 20 - ‘Bookshelves'
While #herbaria are usually single sheets with pressed #plants nowadays, originally they were #books with pressed #flowers. The NHMLondon has more than 1300 volumes of those books. You can browse the complete dataset here: nhm.ac.uk/dataset/bound-volumes-and-exsiccatae

#Introduction. Greetings from SW Australia where it’s easy to get overwhelmed by breath-taking biodiversity. I’m a plant taxonomist at #WAHerbarium, currently synthesizing >2 decades of work on the #Triggerplant family #Stylidiaceae for #FloraofAustralia, with a phylogenomic framework coming down the pike. Tooting mostly about #AustralianPlants, #Botany, #Taxonomy, #Herbaria and #Conservation

My #introduction. I am a #botanist my interests are #taxonomy #systematics #macroevolution #speciation #herbaria and #species concepts. Other than #botany my main interests here are #ecology #nature conservation #rstats #scicomm #dataviz #ecoevo #collections and #biodiversity. I work as a #curator of botany at NMNI.

@Worldturgreen @PLOSBiology I agree, a bad photo or missing characters are the usual issues. In #herbaria, many specimens remain unidentified (and unidentifiable) because essential characters were not collected (e.g., #Commelinaceae are quite notorious as you often need the seeds but the pretty flowers are collected). Sadly, there is so strict rule for all plants which characters are important and which are not. Every group has its own set of traits to distinguish taxa.

#Museum30 Day 15 - ‘Page'
Title pages of #books are often ornamental. #Herbaria bound in a book sometimes go further like this example from the #NHMLondon. Some #herbarium creators made amazing title pages and real #art.
#MastoArt

#Introduction: Hi everyone! I'm a plant taxonomist & systematist doing a post-doc at the University of Adelaide and State Herbarium of South Australia. I am currently working on the phylogenomics of the diverse Australian genus Hibbertia (Dilleniaceae), as well as writing the Flora of Australia treatment for the genus & family. My toots will be primarily about #AustralianPlants, #Botany, #ScientificCollections (#Herbaria), #Taxonomy & #Phylogenetics.

That's why plant collections are stored away from light to protect them.
Unfortunately, #herbaria remain quite hidden from the public eye, but #curators and their colleagues work hard on unfolding and telling the many stories through different ways. #Digitization can help a lot to expose the specimen while keeping them safe at the same time.

It's November, which is the month of #Museum30.
Day 1 - #Museum.
I'm working in the #herbarium at the #NaturalHistoryMuseum in #London. The #NHMLondon was split off the #BritishMuseum in 1881, which itself was born out of Hans #Sloane's (1660-1753) collections of plants, animals, coins, manuscripts, books, antiquities etc.
The natural history collections have a long and complex history. Almost 2 years ago, I wrote a short piece on the history of the NHM #herbaria: https://issuu.com/thevasculum/docs/vasculum_16.1/s/11551043

The NHM in London has about 6 million specimens of plants (and lichens, but no fungi). In my section, I take care of about 500,000-600,000 specimens.

As you can imagine, it is not to easy and cheap to travel to herbaria, and it's not always necessary. That's why many #herbaria digitise their collections. In order to find them, we scan and database them. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of time, but we are working hard.

#Herbaria are such collections. They store many many samples of usually dried and pressed plants. They are basically a #library of #plant #species.
Just like a #librarian, I need to keep order in the chaos, help scientists and visitors to get access or send material on loan. I also provide help to interpret old labels, and I update and reidentify the material.

This is where I work: the #herbarium at the #NaturalHistoryMuseum in London:

So, who gives a plant #species its name?
Well, technically, everybody can do it, but there are rules to it (called #nomenclature) and you need to make a convincing case that the plant you think is new and deserves a name is in fact significantly different from all plants known so far.
In order to do that, you need to know the plants that are related to the potential new plant and how they look like.
This is the point where collections of plant samples, so called #herbaria come into play.