Curatorial Support for the Field Museum Herbarium

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Although the Department of Botany is the smallest of four scientific departments at Field Museum, it administers the fifth largest herbarium in the Western Hemisphere. The botanical collections include 2.4 million specimens, not including unprocessed and unmounted material, and this number increases by approximately 20,000 per year at present mounting rates. During the past five years, incoming accessions averaged over 31,000 per year, with an average of 21,500 mounted and inserted into the herbarium per annum. Since its founding, the Department of Botany has focused on the floras of North, Central and South America. The early strength of the collections in the Neotropical area permit encyclopedic projects such as the Flora of Guatemala and Flora of Peru to be conducted there. Today, the collections and research interests focus on tropical America, both in active research programs and acquisitions of new accessions. The current interest held by the biological community in tropical biodiversity makes the herbarium at Field Museum a crucial information resource. Collection, locality, ecological and taxonomic data provide critical clues toward the solution of global problems such as deforestation, disease control, and hunger. The possible applications of information held within the herbarium, and the varied means through which it might be tapped, are only now being examined. More and varied uses are being found for the plant collections in the herbarium, and the information associated with each specimen will increase in value with time. This project provides partial support for curatorial and mounting activities in the Department of Botany for the next three years.