The Herbarium: Primary Data Source for Biodiversity Research
Posted in Science on December 15th, 2009 by Plant Talk – Be the first to comment |
Barbara Thiers, Ph.D., is Director of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium and oversees the C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium. |
Part 2 in a 3-part series
Read Part 1
Worldwide trends notwithstanding, the chief concern of our William and Lynda Steere Herbarium management team on a daily basis is not the decline in the use of natural history collections, as reported in a New York Times article this summer, but rather how to keep up with the needs of all our users.
Scientists use the Steere Herbarium to answer the most critical questions about plant diversity, namely: How many species are there? How are they related to one another? What environmental factors control their growth? Given that plants supply most of the food, fuel, shelter, and medicines for the earth’s population, predicting how these organisms may respond to climate change is one of the most pressing questions for scientists today.
Visitors are sometimes surprised that most of the scientists who use to the Herbarium are still doing the fundamental work of documenting the Earth’s biodiversity. “Don’t we know all the species yet?” some have asked. The answer is “No, not by a long shot.” Estimates are that we know only about 75 percent of the world’s plant species and less than 10 percent of the species of the fungi, the two major groups of organisms represented in the Herbarium collections. read more »