Curation and Securing of the SUNY Oswego Herbarium

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Plant specimens collected and preserved over many decades provide an irreplaceable primary resource for current and future research. Additionally, as Earth continues to face rapid environmental change and biodiversity loss, the geographically referenced historical record provided by plant specimen collections is invaluable to advancing scientific understanding of the impacts of environmental change. Unfortunately, the trove of data herbaria represent is often at risk of degradation or unavailable for study if resources have prevented institutions from properly housing, cataloging, repairing, and organizing specimens or sharing digital records with the global scientific community. The Oswego Herbarium at the State University of New York at Oswego is one such herbarium, which has recently been properly re-housed in a new facility but remains largely un-cataloged and unavailable to researchers. The overarching goal of this project is to protect and preserve the Oswego Herbarium’s specimens and to make specimen data broadly available via open-source online databases. This will provide the broader scientific community access to the Oswego Herbarium and secure the collection for long-term future use. Key partners for this project will be 20 students in a paid internship program emphasizing participation from underrepresented groups, which will increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the herbarium and museum workforce by providing hands-on training and networking opportunities. The Oswego Herbarium’s 50,000 plant specimens represent at least 1,100 species in 180 plant families, dating from the 1820s to today, and originating from all continents but Antarctica. The most extensive coverage is from the upstate New York region, and the collection contains at least 127 threatened or endangered plant species. With substantial contributions made by female botanists such as Dr. Mildred Faust, the Oswego Herbarium also highlights the contributions women have made to advancing botanical science. To achieve the goal of securing the collection and broadening access, the project team will (1) complete specimen curation and repair; (2) catalog all specimens; (3) digitize the collection using high-resolution photography; and (4) share digitized specimen data on open-access repositories including the Consortium of Northeastern Herbaria, iDigBio, GBIF, and the New York Flora Atlas.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.