The Library as Herbarium

Rare books and herbarium cabinets in the Special Collections vault at West Chester University.

The title of this post is meant to differentiate it from my last post, “Herbaria in Libraries,” which described bound herbaria kept in library special collections.  There are many of these, particularly in Europe where almost all of the oldest herbaria are found.  The case I want to describe here is different:  an entire herbarium now resides in the West Chester University Francis Harvey Green Library’s Special Collections vault.  It used to be housed in the biology department, but its only botanist was retiring, and the department could wanted to use the space for other purposes.  To anyone familiar with the history of herbaria, this is an all too common story, but here the outcome was not moving the collection to one or more other institutions as usually happens.

One of the reasons for this is that the herbarium, named after William Darlington (1782-1863), houses specimens that are among the oldest in the United States and are closely related to the West Chester area.  Darlington, a native of West Chester, was a physician and botanist, who was also one of the founding members of the Chester County Cabinet of Natural Sciences in 1826.  At the time Chester County already had a rich botanical history since it was home to John Jackson whom I mentioned in the last post and to Humphry Marshall who had a conservatory and botanical garden on his farm and sold North American trees and shrubs to European collectors.  His Arbustum Americanum: The American Grove (1785) was the first botanical book produced in America written by a native-born American on American plants.  Though he died in 1801, his garden remained for some time, and Darlington had plants from there in his herbarium.  He also had specimens collected on the Peirce family forest land, which later became Longwood Gardens and from Bartram’s Garden during the time it was being managed by John Bartram’s descendants (Schneider, 2009). 

When I was beginning my herbarium investigations, I gave a talk at the Botanical Society of America’s annual meeting and afterwards a woman suggested I visit West Chester because they had a great historical collection.  I am very sorry that I don’t recall her name because I would love to thank her for the suggestion.  I first visited in 2012 and the curator Sharon Began was very welcoming and helpful.  I had a wonderful time looking at specimens collected by Constantine Rafinesque, William Baldwin, Elias Durand, and Edward Tuckerman.  But there was more, Darlington corresponded and traded specimens with Charles Short, John Torrey, and Asa Gray in the United States and William Jackson Hooker, Augustin de Candolle, and Carl Agardh in Europe.  He opened correspondence with many of these by sending each a copy of the flora of West Chester that he first published in 1826.

During that same visit, I met McColl who was then technician in the university’s special collections and already had a serious interest in Darlington, who had been a major figure in the life of West Chester well beyond his botanical interests.  He was a physician for most of his career, having studied at the University of Pennsylvania under the botanist Benjamin Barton.  He was also important to the political and economic life of West Chester.  He served three terms as congressman as well as being president of the local bank and railway.  Special Collections has several of his letter books where he copied out his correspondence with such notables as de Candolle and Lady Dalhousie, botany enthusiast and plant collector as well as wife of the Governor General of Canada.  I had a great time, was hooked on learning more ,about Darlington and ended up writing an article about how John Torrey (1853) came to name the pitcher plant Darlingtonia californica after him (Torrey, 1853). 

This required a few more trips to West Chester, but I hadn’t been there in several years and so hadn’t seen the herbarium in its new quarters.  When McColl learned of the biology department’s plans, he did a little measuring and figured out how he could store most of the herbarium’s cabinets in the special collections vault.  They just fit.  Also in the vault are the hundreds of books that were in Darlington’s library, including many of the great botanical resources of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, among them an edition of Linnaeus’s short works that had been given to John Bartram and passed on to Darlington by one of Bartram’s descendants.  This book may have been a gift in recognition of Darlington’s publishing a twin memorial on Humphry Marshall and John Bartram based on papers shared with him by members of both families .  McColl argues that this publication, along with a memorial to the botanist William Baldwin who was a good friend, make him a significant early chronicler of American botany.

What caught my eye on my first visit to the collection were the notes that Darlington had attached to many of his specimens, including some that were of personal importance.  One was on a specimen of Darlingtonia brachyloba, a plant de Candolle had named after him.  It was collected in 1847 from “the tomb of my blessed wife.”  He did not note that this name had been synonymized to Desmanthus brachyloba (now Desmanthus illinoensis) in a 1841 publication by the British botanist George Bentham, even though he knew all about it.  When Torrey told him of naming the pitcher plant after him, he wrote back to him fearful that the “odious” George Bentham would do the same to this plant since he had just published a description of a new pitcher plant.  In the herbarium there’s a copy of the Torrey’s publication of the species and a letter from him assuring Darlington that the name was safe.  Torrey even went to the trouble of including a tracing of the illustration in Bentham’s paper, along with a copy of the legend.  I think you can see that Darlington’s herbarium is as much archive as herbarium and has found an appropriate home where, I might add, McColl has had the entire collection digitized over the past few years.

Notes: I am very grateful to Ron McColl for taking the time to show me so many treasures.

References

Schneider, W. M., & Potvin, M. A. (2009). The historic Bartram’s (Carr’s) Garden Collection in West Chester University’s William Darlington Herbarium (DWC). Bartonia, 64, 45–54.

Torrey, J. (1853). On the Darlingtonia californica, a new pitcher-plant from northern California (pp. 1–11). Smithsonian Institution. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/15291

Herbaria in Libraries

Title page of John Jackson’s herbarium given to Francis Alison. Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.

In this post on herbaria and libraries, I’ll look at cases, and there are many, where herbaria are found in archival collections.  These are usually bound, like books, and of more historical than scientific interest, though that is changing somewhat now.  The 16 volumes of the Italian botanist Ulisse Aldrovandi’s 16^th century collection at the University of Bologna have been deconstructed for conservation reasons and the sheets stored in archival boxes.  They have also been the subject of a recent study where the species, most collected around Bologna, were compared with those growing in the same area in the 19^th and 21^st centuries (Buldrini et al., 2023). 

Here I want to look at a few herbaria that aren’t nearly as old but still fascinating.  As I mentioned in the last post, I visited the University of Delaware in February and while I was there I was able to see treasures from its Special Collections.  My guides were Manuscripts Librarian Rebecca Johnson Melvin and Senior Research Fellow Mark Samuels Lasner.  We met in the room housing the Lasner Collection of books, art, and other materials from the Victorian era.  It’s furnished with bookcases and two long tables in William Morris style down to the Morris-inspired fabric on the chair cushions.  One table displayed items from Lasner’s and the library’s collection of Charles Darwin-related material, since I had been invited to speak at an event as part of the university’s Darwin Day celebrations.  There was wonderful material including early editions of many of Darwin’s books.  Lasner had a page of The Various Contrivances by which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects (1862) opened to one of the beautiful lithographs done by George Sowerby II, who had spent 10 days at Darwin’s home working on these illustrations, leaving Darwin at the end “half-dead” (Costa & Angell, 2023).  My favorite piece in Lasner’s display was a 19th-century cartoon by Joseph Keppler from the humor magazine Puck:  Darwin and a pantheon of great minds are highlighted against the enemies of science.  It is labeled “Reason Against Unreason” and seems very timely. 

Before my visit, I had asked Melvin if I could see the herbaria of John Jackson (1748-1821), but she had already put them on her list of items to show me.  They contain plants collected by Jackson at and around his botanical garden and farm, Harmony Grove, in Chester County, Pennsylvania.  I had first encountered him, or at least one of his specimens, in the collection of the physician and botanist William Darlington (1782-1863), which is at West Chester University and is the subject of my next post.  This specimen has a note from Darlington explaining that the plant had come from Jackson’s garden and had been grown from seeds brought back from the Lewis and Clark Expedition.  That intrigued me and so I looked up Jackson, discovered where his herbarium was kept, and took this opportunity to get a look at it.  There are two albums; the thin one with a lovely title page dedicating it to Jackson’s neighbor, the physician Francis Alison.  The larger album has no dedication, but I found a specimen collected by Darlington when his initials WD, which he often used, caught my eye.  It was like meeting an old friend.  Because of the fragility of the paper, I didn’t examine every page, but I got a good sense of the care Jackson took in making the collection.  He was a generation older than Darlington, but they were both Quakers living in an area steeped in the study of natural history and especially botany.  The next day, I went to Special Collections at Swarthmore College, where there is a collection of papers relating to Jackson and his relatives.  I found little about his interest in botany, but did come upon a surprise:  a small notebook filled with plant specimens, each numbered and labeled with common names.  It is dated 1833-1866, but the creator is unknown.  It might be a young person’s collection; it was a surprising little jewel revealing the family’s continued interest in plants.

Melvin also had on display notebooks created by Elizabeth Carrington Morris and her sister Margaretta who were  19^th century naturalists in Philadelphia.  Elizabeth was particularly interested in botany while Margaretta focused on entomology.  They both corresponded with leading scientists in their respective fields, and for Elizabeth that included Asa Gray and Darlington who encouraged the work done by both sisters.  Each one created notebooks that can only be described as exquisite.  Elizabeth painted exceptionally fine paintings of plants and also landscapes; these were interspersed among poems done in fine calligraphy.  Catherine McNeur (2023) has recently written an interesting book on the pair, arguing that they had a significant influence on the development of natural history in the United States.

Next to the notebooks were two student herbaria done by an African-American sister and brother, Anna and Arthur Dickenson in Xenia, Ohio in the early 20^th century.  They had carefully filled in the information in their printed herbarium workbooks and added the specimens, making these good examples of what once was relatively common in American education, in this case in a segregated school.  The final item on display was one I knew about but had never seen and consequently had not fully appreciated.  It is the artist book The Arctic Plants of New York City created by James Walsh (2016).  At least a decade ago on a snowy night in Brooklyn, I had attended the opening of a show of his work.  Though he hadn’t yet produced his book, his theme at the time was Arctic plants, by which he meant those that grew in northern Europe and were brought to the New World by European colonists, and some became weeds here.  At the exhibit, the specimens were on the wall.  In the book they are meticulously mounted, one on a page, with key words printed around each and more information on the opposite page.  The “page” for each plant is heavy cardstock with a mat around the specimen, giving it even more depth.  It is indeed an art book—and an herbarium. 

Note: I want to thank John Jungck for the invitation to speak at the University of Delaware and to Karn Rosenberg for her many kindnesses during the visit. I am especially grateful to Rebecca Johnson Melvin and Mark Samuels Lasner for sharing their treasures and expertise with me. Finally, thanks to so many kind people who made my time at the university so wonderful.

References

Buldrini, F., Alessandrini, A., Mossetti, U., Muzzi, E., Pezzi, G., Soldano, A., & Nascimbene, J. (2023). Botanical memory: Five centuries of floristic changes revealed by a Renaissance herbarium (Ulisse Aldrovandi, 1551–1586). Royal Society Open Science, 10(11), 230866. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230866

Costa, J. T., & Angell, B. (2023). Darwin and the Art of Botany: Observations on the Curious World of Plants. Portland, OR: Timber Press.

McNeur, C. (2023). Mischievous Creatures. New York: Basic Books.

Walsh, J. (2016). The Artic Plants of New York City. New York: Granary.

Herbaria as Libraries

Specimen of Lysimachia lutea in Vol 5 of the Felix Platter Herbarium at the Bern City Library.

I’ve always found the connection between libraries and herbaria intriguing.  I’ve wanted to write about it and now seems a good time because a few weeks ago I went to four libraries in three days as part of what I consider a whirlwind trip to Delaware.  I was invited to speak as part of the annual Darwin Day celebration at the University of Delaware and visited its library’s Special Collections.  I drove up from South Carolina because I wanted to also go to libraries at Swarthmore College, West Chester University, and Oak Spring Garden.  Not surprisingly, all these institutions’ libraries house herbaria in one form or another, and I’ll describe them in this series of posts.   

I’ll begin with the most obvious similarities between libraries and herbaria, and then use the collections I saw to dig into some intriguing connections between the two.  Libraries and herbaria are both repositories for information on paper.  Early herbaria were often bound like other paper leaves would be, but this practice was eventually given up because it made the rearrangement of specimens into groups of similar species difficult.  So herbarium sheets, now usually unbound and kept in folders, are stored horizontally, and the same is true of most bound volumes.  The latter include exsiccatae or published herbaria, many from the 19^th and early 20^th centuries that were collections of specimens with printed labels.  These were gathered by professional plant hunters who often preserved 20 or more specimens of a species and served as a source of income for many collectors. 

There are a number of ways in which the mechanics of a library and an herbarium are similar.  Their holdings are catalogued and stored in an orderly arrangement so items can be easily retrieved.  Over the centuries, libraries on the whole have been better at this than herbaria.  Usually, each book or periodical acquired is recorded, given an identifier, and shelved according to some classification system.  The same is true of many herbarium sheets, however the recording system was often not as foolproof.  Libraries usually log in their book acquisitions shortly after arrival, though if an entire collection is acquired this may take some time.  Herbaria are more likely to have major backlogs.  When the herbarium at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris was renovated, curators found 800,000 unmounted and often unidentified specimens.  This represented roughly 10% of the entire collection (Le Bras et al., 2017).  According to a manager of the project, there were piles, packages, and boxes everywhere, many over a century old. 

It’s rare to find an herbarium without a backlog.  Many have boxes of unprocessed specimens stored on top of cabinets, glaring down on overworked staff.  This is one reason why so many new species are found among already collected material.  Now it is true that libraries do sometimes find hidden gems, especially in archives where backlogs are more likely.  European libraries are particularly prone to this problem because they often store much older material that may be unexamined for centuries.  That’s why wonderful finds are sometimes made including eight volumes of the Swiss physician Felix Platter’s (1536-1614) herbarium found at the University of Bern’s Institute of Plant Sciences in 1930 (Rytz, 1936).  It has now been beautifully curated at the Bern City Library.

One of the reasons a number of discoveries, both in herbaria and libraries, have been made over the past few decades is because both these types of institutions have had massive digitization projects.  Here the libraries have been in the vanguard since library science as a discipline was revolutionized beginning in the 1960s.  The creation of library databases was key to the development of the very concept of a database, and librarians became early adopters of innovations in information technology.  I worked for many years at an institution with a computer science program and an IT department, but I gained most of my knowledge about databases and metadata from librarians because they had not only technical expertise but communication skills—and the patience of Job.

In many cases, herbarium curators particularly at smaller institutions also learned about information technology from librarians.  The latter had both the skill and the necessary tools.  By the 1980s, libraries had scanners and were beginning to image books.  Since most herbarium specimens were flat sheets, they could be treated in a similar way.  In some cases, the herbaria also used library software to store information, though this was less than ideal because the metadata fields were often inadequate.  But still, many libraries provide the first support for herbaria that then began to learn from other natural history collections as support from NSF grew for digitization projects. 

One way many libraries differ from many herbaria is in encouraging access.  For the most part, herbaria have been worlds closed off from the public, while libraries foster traffic, though special collections housing rare books are more in the herbarium mold, usually limiting visits to those with a stated reason involving research.  I’d like to end with one more similarity, I have found both libraries and herbaria to be places where the staff are geared to being helpful.  They are stewards of rich resources that they care deeply about and have the expertise to help visitors use them.  They love their collections and also know so much about them.  Both types of institutions are also places of peace where we can think about the riches with which we are surrounded.

Note: I want to thank the many librarians who contributed information to these posts, and especially to Ron McColl, Special Collections Librarian at the Francis Harvey Green Library at West Chester University for his insights and comments.

References

Le Bras, G., et al. (2017). The French Muséum national d’histoire naturelle vascular plant herbarium collection dataset. Scientific Data, 4(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2017.16

Rytz, W. (1936). Pflanzenaquarelle des Hans Weiditz aus dem Jahre 1529. Bern: Haupt.

Outreach: Social Media

Watercolor of Alder catkins and strobiles collected in January 1890 by Henry Leopold Foster Guermonprez; Cumberland House Natural History Museum

In today’s world it’s almost impossible to ignore social media in communication, and this is definitely true in the world of herbaria.  Yes, there are many people who don’t use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., but most institutions now realize that if they want to reach people today, they must have a “web presence.”  This means at the very least a website with essential information about what they do and how to contact them—and often, how to contribute to their work.  I have mentioned this before, but I am proud to repeat that I work at an institution with the web address:  herbarium.org, thanks to the prescience of John Nelson, then curator at the A.C. Moore Herbarium of the University of South Carolina, who snagged this gem early in the history of the worldwide web.

Now A.C. Moore also has a Facebook page and accounts on Twitter and Instagram, which admittedly vary in activity over time.  An early adopter librarian convinced me almost 14 years ago that Twitter could be a valuable tool for academic communication and she was right.  I’ve learned a tremendous amount from those I follow on the platform, though its effectiveness has definitely ebbed over the last couple of years.  This is to the detriment of science, as noted in an article in Nature.  Scientists found it a useful if not essential tool in finding information and new collaborators, well as in making their research results better known.  Like many others, I’ve created accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, but haven’t found them very effective so far.  I have never been able to get interested in Facebook, but I may have to give it another try, and for me, Instagram is where I keep up with art and particularly fiber art: it’s for my “other” life. 

Now I want to get to what I consider one of the most effective forms of botanical communication on the web:  blog posts.  This is where I’ve learned about hidden herbarium collections around the world, the latest efforts to create effective links between digital platforms and plant-related information, and the essential ties between herbaria and biodiversity conservation.  I have often found these posts because they were announced on Twitter, so these channels are definitely related and keeping these links alive requires a great deal of work.  Some institutions create blog posts regularly, one like the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew has the resources to do this.  For others, the communication may be more sporadic, but that doesn’t mean it is less effective.  I have discovered some great institutions though their posts. 

A case in point is the Cumberland House Natural History Museum in Portsmouth, England.  It’s a museum with many different collections dealing with the history and culture of this port city.  Its natural history collection came to it over 50 years ago from the nearby Bognor Regis Museum and is primarily from Henry Leopold Foster Guermonprez (1858-1924).  He was particularly interested in ornithology, but also amassed 10,000 fossil and rocks, as well as thousands of  herbarium specimens.  The museum’s herbarium, which isn’t registered in Index Herbariorum, houses 20,000 specimens in all gathered by a number of different collectors. 

What I found particularly interesting about Guermonprez’s collection is that it also includes quite good watercolors of many of the plants, often with dissections and enlargements of flower parts.  I learned about these in a blog post entitled “The Herbarium in January” that includes a chart of when he collected specimens in that month between 1890, when he moved to the coast and 1923, the year before he died.  January 1910 produced his best haul for that month; not surprisingly, it was composed more of marine algae than of land plants.  A little research revealed that on some of his collecting days the temperature was 14°F.  The post also has drawings of fungi and lichens from January as well as catkins suggesting the promise of spring.  Another Cumberland House post deals with just one species, the black spleenwort fern (Asplenium adiantum-nigrum) and where he collected three specimens over the years.  There is something of ecology here and a sense of where he collected, from a cave in Cornwall to a stone monument and a mining area, both in Wales.

I’ve selected these posts because they come from a rather obscure collection.  I could have quoted from the many posts published on the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium’s Hand Lens site or the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh’s Botanics Stories.  There have been great posts at the latter over the years, particularly from Henry Noltie, a now-retired curator, whose extensive knowledge of botany and art is amazing, particularly in relation to India.  The wonderful thing is that posts like these gems remain available on the web.  Because they deal with history, they are in a sense timeless.  However, there are also many posts on the latest in herbarium activities, including several from Kew on its involvement in ethnobotany, land restoration, seed banking, African agriculture, and many other topics.  Of course, one subject that Kew would rather not get attention is its plan to move the herbarium, one of the world’s largest, to a site about 40 miles from the garden.  Many in the herbarium world are aghast at this prospect, but the administration has made it clear that those who work at Kew, and even volunteer there, are not to criticize the plan or participate in any activities related to upending it.  Even some botanical social media can be contentious.

Outreach: Botanical Research

Map of New Jersey marking ports in Jersey City and Camden from Schmidt et al., 2023.

While research is an intrinsic mission for most herbaria, it is not usually seen as a form of outreach, but I would argue that in some cases it definitely can be.  In this post in my series on outreach (1,2), I’d like to present two recently published papers based on herbarium specimens that are scientifically interesting and fascinating enough to intrigue the general public.  The first is on seeds brought in with ballast on ships during the 19^th century and comes from the Chrysler Herbarium (CHRB) at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (Schmidt et al., 2023).  The lead author Ryan Schmidt was a curatorial assistant there while completing his undergraduate and early graduate studies; he has now moved on to a Ph.D. program at Harvard University.  The last author is Lena Struwe, a professor of plant biology at Rutgers and director of the herbarium.  Struwe is the kind of dynamo who makes the herbarium world exciting.  She is an active researcher, a well-known taxonomist, and a generator of student enthusiasm.  She developed Botany Depot, “a global website for creative ideas and materials for teaching botany in the 21st century for all ages and levels.”  It became a particularly important site during the covid pandemic.  The other coauthors are Megan King, the herbarium manager, and Myla Aronson, a Rutgers professor who focuses on urban ecological studies.  It definitely takes a team to produce an article like this, with Schmidt and Struwe designing the study and Schmidt collecting specimens and doing the analytics.

            Schmidt took advantage of an area in which the Chrysler Herbarium is particularly strong, New Jersey plants, and asked what became of the many plants that came into the state via its ports at Jersey City and Camden (see map above).  During the 19^th century, ballast—usually sand, rocks, and soil—was used to balance sailing ships without enough cargo to keep them stable, a practice that ended by 1900 with the demise of wind-powered vessels.  When the ships reached port they loaded their cargo after dumping the ballast on nearby land.  Inevitably there were seeds in this material and many of them sprouted in and around the dumps.  Some flourished, produced seed, and spread; others didn’t make it.  Since these areas were active collecting sites in the 19^th century, Schmidt was able to find over 200 species in the herbaria that were nonnative and that grew around Camden and Jersey City.  He then followed what happened to these plants in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, doing a new survey of these areas in 202I-2022.  He worked with over 8000 specimens in all and did a number of sophisticated statistical analyses on his results. 

            There is a great deal packed into this article, so all I can give is a brief summary of the results, but they are fascinating.  Schmidt was able to divide the species into four groups.  First were the “waifs,” making up 32% of the species; they grew and set seed but didn’t maintain stable populations and were only found as long at the ballast practice continued.  The “short-term” species (20%) did hang on into the 20^th century but disappeared rather quickly.  The “established-limited spread” (30%) survived locally, mostly in the areas around the ports, while the “established-widespread” (18%) became broadly established and in some cases are now considered invasives.  This study received media attention because it dealt with an important part of New Jersey’s history and also with the present problem of invasive species.  This research was interesting even to people who didn’t know plant collections existed, so it not only contributed to ecological and botanical knowledge, but to bringing herbaria to the larger community.

            A similar buzz surrounded a paper published by a team from the Botany Department (CM) at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.  The first author is Molly Ng, a postdoctoral fellow at the museum, while the next two authors, a professor Ryan Utz and a student Alyssa McCormick, are from Chatham University north of Pittsburg (Ng et al., 2023).  The last author is another dynamic herbarium curator Mason Heberling who has a knack for investigating news-worthy topics.  This case involves that odious plant Toxicodendron radicans, poison ivy.  The research team used the herbarium’s historic collections along with freshly collected material to study the effects of elevated CO₂ levels on leaf production, water-use efficiency, and toxicity, which had been shown experimentally to be elevated by increased CO₂.  However, field studies hadn’t found an increase in the abundance of poison ivy.  Studies in many species have revealed decreased stomatal density with increased CO₂, and it was true in the present one.  Though leaf area increased, as would be expected from more robust growth, there was a decrease in water-use efficiency that may explain why the species growth overall didn’t change.  I can’t go into more details here, but the punch line—that poison ivy growth isn’t being spurred by global warming—made the news, greeted eagerly by those of us used to things doing from bad to worse.  Obviously more research is called for here, but again, it is always a plus when herbaria make it into the public consciousness and when the history of botany proves important to its future.  In the next post, I’ll look at herbaria are reaching out beyond the bounds of their collections through social media.

References

Ng, M., McCormick, A., Utz, R. M., & Heberling, J. M. (2023). Herbarium specimens reveal century-long trait shifts in poison ivy due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions. American Journal of Botany, 110(9), e16225. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajb2.16225

Schmidt, R. J., King, M. R., Aronson, M. F. J., & Struwe, L. (2023). Hidden cargo: The impact of historical shipping trade on the recent-past and contemporary non-native flora of northeastern United States. American Journal of Botany, 110(9), e16224. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajb2.16224

Outreach: Community Science

Homepage for Notes from Nature

In the last 15 years there has been nothing short of an explosion in community science projects in the herbarium world.  Terminology can be tricky here.  What is now called “community science” is also known by the somewhat more familiar “citizen science.”  In many cases, both terms also refer to plain old volunteering.  In the past, being a volunteer in an herbarium often meant mounting specimens, but with the dawn of the digital age, imaging sheets and inputting label data have become crucial activities.  While there may be hundreds or even thousands of specimens to mount, there are millions of specimens requiring digitization. 

When I applied to volunteer at New York Botanical Garden about ten years ago, they had their quota of professional and volunteer mounters, but they always needed more digitizers.  I began by learning to photograph specimens and eventually moved on to label transcription.  That was when the garden was just getting its toes wet with more formal community science projects, and the woman I worked with was writing a guide to digitization for new volunteers.  This led the garden’s participation in the Notes from Nature initiative, part of Zooniverse, a platform for projects pairing volunteers with professional researchers.  Within Zooniverse, Notes from Nature projects are designed to transcribe natural history records; to date the result has been over a million and a half completed records.

There are other such endeavors including the Australia-based DigiVol, DoeDat in Belgium, Herbonaut in France, and Herbaria at Home in Britain.  In the United States, a major spur to community science in natural history is the NSF-sponsored WeDigBio, which organizes events such as days where herbaria invite the public to help digitize specimens.  This has made a major impact on herbarium work because some volunteers become so interested that they continue to contribute long after the event.  Many colleges and universities participate, with some students becoming regular volunteers or even student workers. 

Young people are particularly important in community science programs because through these activities they may develop a life-long interest in the natural world.  The other large community science population includes those at the other end of the age spectrum who are looking for interesting endeavors after retirement.  Many in this category have always had an interest in nature, and these projects give them a new way to learn more about the living world—and maybe pick up some computer skills as well.  They also come with a skill that younger volunteers often lack:  the ability to read the cursive handwriting on many older specimens labels.  These are the very specimens that are of interest now since they are used in longitudinal studies of global warming and environmental change more generally. 

As to computer skills, the latest projects sometimes involve AI, and I want to focus here on an article I read recently about community science participation in a machine learning study (Guralnick et al., 2023).  Over the past ten years, millions of specimens have been imaged, but label transcription lags behind because of difficulties in using optical character recognition (OCR) in this process.  It is not just a matter of transcribing the words and numbers accurately, it involves inserting them in the correct fields, that is, being able to put the species name in one field and collector name in another.  It gets even trickier with associated taxa and locality information. 

AI is much touted, but making AI happen is hardly easy.  Computers have to be trained and that takes a lot of human input.  This report is on two humans-in-the-loop processes, with the humans working in a Notes from Nature framework especially designed for the project.  In this case, volunteers worked on a training set for a program that recognizes where the labels are positioned on a sheet as well as the difference between typed and cursive labels.  The trainers drew boxes around the labels, and then input whether each was typed or handwritten—or a combination of both.  The results from use of the initial training set led to refinements, so the second set gave a much higher success rate of 95% correct when tested on specimens.  The other program entailed developing an OCR pipeline that makes the label data easier for machine reading and puts it through an OCR tool, then the output is further refined and corrected.  To do this work, a test set of labels was needed that itself didn’t contain common errors like misspellings or extra spaces.  Two volunteers transcribed the label information and then crosschecked each other’s work. 

Based on the results with this training set, further refinements were made in the OCR system to improve its output.  For still further improvement, the output was fed into an OCR correction tool in Notes from Nature project.  Volunteers compared the label information with a box containing the OCR output which they corrected as needed.  The results of this work were then be used to further refine the system.  The many tasks involved in creating and using this system gives some idea of just how difficult it is to employ AI with very heterogenous inputs.  It also suggests how much time and human involvement is entailed, and why in a field like natural history collection, where financial resources are so minimal, community science is so important.

Reference

Guralnick, R., LaFrance, R., Denslow, M., Blickhan, S., Bouslog, M., Miller, S., Yost, J., Best, J., Paul, D. L., Ellwood, E., Gilbert, E., & Allen, J. (2024). Humans in the loop: Community science and machine learning synergies for overcoming herbarium digitization bottlenecks. Applications in Plant Sciences, 12(1), e11560. https://doi.org/10.1002/aps3.11560

Outreach in Finland

Linaria vulgaris (yellow toadflax) collected by Elias Lönnrot in 1860 in South Häme, Finland; Herbarium TUR

At the back of each issue of Taxon, the journal of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, there’s a section called “Plant Systematics World” edited by Sandra Knapp and Jun Wen.  In the October 2023 issue, there was an article by Finnish researchers (Lehtonen et al., 2023) telling of the celebrations around the 100th anniversary of the founding of the herbarium at the University of Turku (TUR).  It enthusiastically describes the herbarium’s history and present-day activities through the lens of the events, exhibits, and online media developed for the occasion.  These are great examples of herbarium outreach, something that’s on the minds of many in the herbarium world who are attempting to increase their institutions’ place in the public consciousness.

TUR became a physical reality in 1922, two years after the founding of the university.  A little history is needed here.  From the 13^th century, Finland was part of Sweden until 1809 when it became part of Russia until declaring its independence in 1917 during the Russian revolution.  In Helsinki, the nation’s capital, the official language at the time was Swedish, but at the new institution it was Finnish.  Thus it was significant that one of the founding collections for the herbarium was that of Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884), who wrote a poem based on Finnish folklore and myths and also helped develop Finnish as a cohesive language, part of a national awakening.  With a great interest in plants and language, he created Finnish botanical terminology, most of which is still in use.  In addition, he published the first book in Finnish on the country’s flora.  As part of the anniversary celebration, the 750 extant specimens from Lönnrot’s herbarium were digitized and made available online, and this was given media attention:  one of the hallmarks of outreach.

Lönnrot is a great example of how herbarium history intertwines with culture and politics.  Another case occurred during World War II when Finland staved off a Soviet attempt to invade the country and went on to annex the Karelia region from the Soviets.  In an effort to make a case for East Karelia as botanically part of Finland not Russia, researchers from the University of Turku studied the region’s flora.  One of the participants was Lauri Kari, a pioneer in color photography.  Many of his slides were included in an online exhibit about Finnish botany during the war.  The interest in this presentation, which had also been given media attention, was so great that the website crashed on the first day.

The article gives the sense that present-day curators of the collection’s heritage are very aware of it and want their fellow citizens to know about it.  There were several physical as well as virtual anniversary events.  The first was a BioBlitz on the university’s campus in May 2022.  Next was an exhibit on Seili Island off the coast of Turku where the university has as biodiversity research unit that encourages ecotourism.  In the distant past, the island served as a refuge for lepers and later as a mental hospital.  Many of the old wooden buildings remain, and one was the site of a display on the herbarium’s activities. 

Later the presentation was expanded and moved to Turku’s main library, with material from the herbarium collection.  There were interactive displays including a puzzle on assembling a plant plastome genome and a balsa log which children could try to lift to show their strength.  Needless to say botanical art was represented, including old botany charts and anatomical plant models.  These were accompanied by examples of student herbaria.  Until 1969, making an herbarium was a mandatory part of the Finnish school curriculum, so some visitors had memories of this activity and a number had even kept to their collections.  Some younger visitors also have such memories because the requirement was reinstated in 2004, though now a school can decide whether to require a physical collection or an digital one.  To me this says a lot about the place of plants in Finnish culture and what Finns value. 

The library exhibit was accompanied by a series of eight lectures that were also available digitally.  They dealt with the research activities of the university’s Biodiversity Unit that houses the herbarium.  The most popular talk was given by Kati Pihlaja a researcher in the herbarium who spoke about the mistletoe Viscum album and its presence in Turku over recent years.  Its spread is being tracked with the help of a community or citizen science project, yet another form of outreach.  Another session dealt with a project to develop a Flora of Turku, and there was one on using herbarium specimens to assess endangered species.  The program planners knew their audience and so included a presentation on indoor molds and wood-rooting fungi that are a special problem in a country with so many wooden structures. 

I felt invigorated when I finished reading this short article.  It was exciting to read about an herbarium that is focused on its history and its cultural significance as well as on botany.  It is also one that is definitely looking to the future in terms of its research agenda as well as its use of social media and digitization of its collection.  This outreach in many different directions seems to me exemplary, though I’m aware that it’s hardly unique.  Herbaria worldwide are adopting such practices as they become increasingly aware of the important contributions they can make to the community at large and even to national identity. Examples of these initiatives will be the focus of the remaining posts in this series.

Reference

Lehtonen, S., Cárdenas, G. G., Huhtinen, S., Huttunen, S., Keskiniva, V., Kosonen, T., Kuusisto, I., Lampinen, J., Lempiäinen-Avci, M., Llerena, N., Luong, T. T., Marsh, T., Oksanen, H., Pihlaja, K., Puolasmaa, A., Riikonen, R., Toivonen, M., & Wahlsten, A. (2023). Herbarium TUR celebrates its 100 years. TAXON, 72(5), 1196–1198. https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.13069

Correa in the United States 1812-1820

Abbé José Correa da Serra

The last portion of José Correa da Serra’s long-term exile from his native Portugal was spent in the United States (see earlier posts 1,2,3).  After leaving France, this botanist-diplomat landed in Norfolk, Virginia in 1812 and made Philadelphia his favored city.  Soon he was known to the botanist Benjamin Barton, who had written the first botany text written in the United States, and he traveled to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to meet Henry Muhlenberg, who would publish a book on North American plants.  In 1813, he visited Thomas Jefferson for the first time, and the two got along so well that as I mentioned in the first post, one of Monticello’s bedrooms was referred to by the family as Correa’s room.  Like Jefferson, Correa knew Paris well and also had spent years in England.  He was politically astute and was also scientifically literate like the former president.  When Jefferson was writing a proposal for a university in Virginia, Correa gave him advice on the structure and also on the curriculum, particularly in the areas of botany and agriculture (Davis, 1955). 

            When he arrived in the US, Correa was 62 years old but managed to do some significant traveling in a day when long journeys were always arduous.  In 1812, he went to New York City and then north to Lake George and into Vermont, as far north as the Canadian border.  His aim was then to go west to visit Niagara Falls, but the War of 1812 with Britain disrupted these plans.  The conflict also made communication with Europe more difficult and held up the transfer of funds from the Portuguese government to Correa.  The situation worsened to the point that Correa traveled to Boston, intending to sail back to Europe, but funds arrived in time to allow him to stay.  While in botanist, he befriended the young botanist Jacob Bigelow and looked through Correa’s herbarium which is no longer extant (Ewan, 1956). In June 1814, he traveled to Pittsburg and then on to Lexington, KY, making botanical and agricultural observations as he went; he later presented a paper at the American Philosophical Society on the soils of Kentucky.  From there he again visited Monticello where he met a young neighbor of Jefferson’s Francis Gilmer whose interest in botany Correa encouraged. 

            By September of the same year, Correa was again at Monticello, this time intending to head to Cherokee settlements, receiving a letter of introduction from Jefferson to a Cherokee agent.  Francis Gilmer was eager to accompany Correa and so in September 1814 the two set out with Jefferson for Poplar Forest, his retreat near the Blue Ridge Mountains.  On the way they stopped at the Natural Bridge and Correa speculated on how it had come to be.  Gilmer kept a careful notebook of his and Correa’s botanical observations.  The two then traveled through southwest Virginia to Knoxville where they spent several days botanizing and visiting Cherokee territory.  Gilmer’s notes included five pages on Cherokee vocabulary.  They then went to Athens, Georgia and met William Greene, a mathematics professor at the University of Georgia who was also interested in botany.  They traveled on to Augusta on the Savannah River and then to Charleston, South Carolina.  I live about a half hour east of Augusta in Aiken, South Carolina, and I’ve driven up to the University of Georgia a number of times; it’s over a two-hour trip.  From my home to Charleston is at least two and a half hours.  But Correa were traveling through relatively unpopulated territory over trails rather than roads.  This was indeed a significant journey. 

            Correa’s reason for visiting Charleston, besides its being the heart of culture in the Carolinas, was to meet Stephen Elliott, who was, of course, a botanist.  He knew of Correa’s trip from Muhlenberg and another Pennsylvania botanist, Zacchaeus Collins, and greeted the travelers warmly.  Correa was only planning to stay overnight, but as he wrote later, he remained for two weeks being entertained by Elliott and others, including the Rutledges, descendants of John Rutledge one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.  From Charleston they went once again to Monticello, reaching there in early December.  Correa told Jefferson that Elliott, who wrote two volumes on the plants of South Carolina and Georgia, was the ablest botanist he had met in the US.  Correa then spent Christmas with Gilmer in Winchester, Virginia and traveled on to Delaware to usher in the New Year with his Paris friend Pierre du Pont. 

            Of course, Correa ended his trip in Philadelphia, where he remained botanically active.  At the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Barton was unable to teach his botany course in 1815, so Correa took on the assignment and did so well that he repeated it in 1816.  By that time, he had written a short text reworking Muhlenberg’s book on North American plants with a natural classification system.  This was thought to be the first presentation of such a system in the US.  However, during his later years in the country he had less time for travel and botany because he was occupied with diplomatic affairs.  He received an official assignment from the Portuguese government and submitted his credentials to President James Madison and Secretary of State James Monroe.  The relationship between the two countries was strained over shipping issues, with US privateers attacking Portuguese ships traveling between Europe and Brazil.  In 1820 when the political situation finally improved in Portugal he returned, but by then he was not well.  He did receive many honors, but died in 1823. 

References

Davis, R. B. (1955). The Abbé Correa in America, 1812-1820: The Contributions of the Diplomat and Natural Philosopher to the Foundations of Our National Life. Correspondence with Jefferson and Other Members of the American Philosophical Society and with Other Prominent Americans. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 45(2), 87–197. https://doi.org/10.2307/1005770

Ewan, J. (1956). Correa da Serra and American Botany. Rhodora, 58(686), 45–48.

Correa in France 1802-1812

Antoine Laurent de Jussieu

In this series of posts (1,2) on the Portuguese botanist and diplomat José Correa da Serra, it’s time to examine the years he spent in France.  By the end of 1801 he decided that the new Portuguese ambassador to Britain with whom he didn’t agree politically, was making his life so unpleasant in London that Paris seemed to provide a more welcoming atmosphere.  Through his wide correspondence, he already knew such key botanical French figures as Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and Augustin Pyramus de Candolle.  Soon after his arrival, he was ensconced in a scientific circle that included not only these botanists but also the zoologist Georges Cuvier and the explorer Alexander von Humboldt.  It became common for the four to meet regularly at de Candolle’s home for discussions on plants, geography, and natural history in general.  Apparently Correa had a friendly manner, was without pretension, and was knowledgeable on a broad range of topics, explaining why he seemed to fit into whatever milieu he encountered (Davis, 1955). 

His ten years in Paris were his most scientifically productive period.  He spent much time at the Jardin des Plantes, which was then the hub for French natural history and where Jussieu, de Candolle, and Cuvier all worked.  It had an excellent herbarium that Correa took advantage of.  It was in France that he wrote his work on citrus classification published in 1805, though he had been doing research on this family for some time.  He used Jussieu’s natural classification system and introduced the idea of symmetry as an important element in classification. 

As I mentioned in the first post in this series, after my initial introduction to Correa as a friend of Thomas Jefferson’s, he kept popping up in my reading in surprising places, including the plant morphologist Agnes Arber’s (1950) The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form.  Quite some time ago, I had done research on Arber’s ideas on plant anatomy that were influenced by Wolfgang von Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants(1790).  When I reread Arber’s book more recently, there was Correa, who hadn’t registered with me before.  She introduces him in a chapter on Goethe’s idea of type as a general concept of a plant “from which the concepts of existing plant forms could be derived mentally” (p. 59.)  She writes of Correa’s “very stormy” life as explaining his dearth of publications, but notes:  “The little that he published was, however, of an original character, and disclosed luminous ideas” (p. 60). 

Arber argues that de Candolle took from Correa the idea of a type, a plan underlying each group of plants.  Correa called this symmetry and as he explained in an article on monocots and dicots, he meant by this the particular arrangement of the parts which results from their respective situation and their forms.  De Candolle added that symmetry here means a general system of organization, a non-geometric regularity of organized bodies as a result of spatial repetition of forms.  Correa presented these ideas in papers on seeds and fruits published in the annals of the Museum of Natural History in Paris.  He based his work on careful observation, studying not only external anatomy but also doing dissections, especially of reproductive structures, using the facilities at the Jardin des Plantes.  He argued that such comparative anatomical work was essential in answering questions in classification.  He had also extensively studied the research of others, quoting from the literature in several languages.  It must be noted that wherever he lived, Correa had access to fine botanical libraries.  And though de Candolle wrote at one point scolding him that he was less assiduous in his work than he could be, he nonetheless contributed important observations to botanical conversations of the day.

Because of his diplomatic contacts, Correa traveled not only in scientific circles but in political ones as well.  He knew the Marquis de Lafayette and Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, who had served in King Louis XVI’s government and was involved in working out the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War.  When the French Revolution began six years later, he emigrated with his family to the United States, where his son eventually founded the company that retains the family name today.  Over the years Du Pont traveled back and forth between the two countries.  It was probably through Lafayette and Dupont that Correa met American diplomats like David Warden and Joel Barlow.  These individuals all supported Correa in his decision to leave France and move to the United States.  This new exile was precipitated by Napoleon who was pressuring Correa to write glowingly of French science.  As before, Correa chose to uproot himself rather than to soften his views. 

Lafayette, Dupont, and Humboldt all provided Correa with letters of introduction to Thomas Jefferson, but it turned out that he didn’t even need them since his diplomatic contacts put him in touch with President James Madison, who in turn contacted Jefferson about the new arrival.  But before traveling south, Correa set himself up in Philadelphia because at this point he knew enough about the country to realize that this was its intellectual center.  It had the American Philosophical Society and its library, as well as the Academy of Natural Sciences.  Politics could wait until he found his scientific footing, as will become clear in the next post.

References

Arber, A. R. (1950). The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form. Cambridge University Press.

Davis, R. B. (1955). The Abbé Correa in America, 1812-1820: The Contributions of the Diplomat and Natural Philosopher to the Foundations of Our National Life. Correspondence with Jefferson and Other Members of the American Philosophical Society and with Other Prominent Americans. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 45(2), 87–197. https://doi.org/10.2307/1005770

Correa in England (1795-1801)

Robert Brown

In the last post, I introduced José Correa da Serra, a Portuguese botanist/diplomat/ priest whose liberal views caused him trouble at home and sent him into exile in England in 1795.  This was a turbulent time with Britain just emerging from the loss of its American colonies, the Revolution continuing in France, and Portugal wrestling with its vast colony of Brazil.  No matter where he went Correa managed to be involved in Portuguese diplomatic circles, and botanical circles as well.  Since Portugal lacked a sophisticated scientific community, Correa sought foreign correspondents to share botanical ideas and as sources of the latest information (Davis, 1955).  Whether he planned it this way or not, these contacts allowed him to move from country to country and quickly fit into new botanical milieus.  Since he was already in contact with James Edward Smith, founder of the Linnean Society with whom he corresponded for 38 years, he was able to seek help from Smith’s fellow botanist Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society and influential in political circles as well, to say nothing of his role as unofficial director of the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. 

Correa must have had impressive language skills, because he was able to present papers in English as well as French and Portuguese.  Correa, through another of his correspondents, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, botanist at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, became interested in the natural system of plant classification as an alternative to Carl Linnaeus’s artificial classification system.  The latter was based on plants’ reproductive structures, making it easy to use, but it resulted in putting plants in the same class that differed greatly in other characteristics.  A natural system was built on a broader variety of traits, though specifically which traits should be considered was up for discussion.  The French botanist Michel Adamson, a generation older than Jussieu, had also worked on the same problem.  The British were less interested in natural systems, having been the first country outside Sweden to accept Linnaean classification.  Also, France and Britain were at odds politically, making French ideas less palatable. 

For Correa, the natural system made sense and he pushed that point in England, including by presenting a paper on the subject to the Linnean Society.  He interested a young Scottish botanist Robert Brown in the concept.  Brown was serving with the military in Ireland and using his free time to collect plants and investigate them.  He was in contact with James Smith and with the Linnean Society vice-president Jonas Dryander, and through them, not surprisingly, with Correa.  Brown had heard via this grapevine that Joseph Banks was searching for a botanist to accompany Captain Matthew Flinders on his planned circumnavigation of Australia.  Banks had approached Mungo Park, who had already led an expedition to Africa, but Park declined even after repeated urgings from Banks (Schwartz, 2021).  Brown was too self-effacing to contact Banks directly, so he asked Correa for an introduction and thus received a glowing recommendation.  The resulting expedition made Brown’s career in botany.  He collected prodigiously with the assistance of a gardener from Kew Peter Good and the botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer, and he later became Banks’s librarian and keeper of his herbarium. 

Brown was grateful to Correa for his assistance, and when reporting to Banks during the trip, he always asked to be remembered to Correa.  When Brown published his list of Australian plants, including his own many discoveries, in Prodromus Novae Hollandiae (1810), he employed the natural classification system.  Correa used it himself in his work on citrus fruits.  In 1799, he read a paper at the Linnean Society in which he moved two genera of plants into a new, natural family called Aurantia renaming Crateva marmelos as Aegle marmelos (now in the Rutaceae) and Crateva balangas as Fermonia balangas; the name A. marmelos has held.  Correa was also interested in plants growing in water.  He presented a paper at the Linnean Society in which he argued that algae reproduced sexually.  He provided details of the observations of Johann Friedrich Gmelin and Joseph Gaertner, two German botanists, who took different views.  Then he presented his case, which was hardly correct in all its details since reproduction in algae wasn’t worked out until the middle of the 19^th century, but he made a number of astute observations.

Correa also wrote a fascinating paper on a “submarine forest” in Lincolnshire, this time to the Royal Society.  He and Banks went on a botanical excursion to this region on England’s east coast.  He describes an area where at low tide “islets” appear that are composed of tree trunks, roots, branches, and leaves, intermixed with aquatic plants.  There were a few erect tree trunks, but most had fallen over and were in various states of decay.  He was able to make out some of the species present including oak, birch, and fir.  There were other trees in the mix, but he admitted that he didn’t know enough about the comparative anatomy of trees to identify the other woods.  He also discussed how this area may have become submerged and suggested it might be due to land subsidence.  After reading this article it didn’t come as a surprise to learn that Correa had an interest in soil and geology; his knowledge in these areas is obvious here.  His depth of understanding seems to have allowed him to take advantage of new opportunities that opened for him, such as exploring the English seaside, and then eventually moving on to France.

References

Davis, R. B. (1955). The Abbé Correa in America, 1812-1820: The Contributions of the Diplomat and Natural Philosopher to the Foundations of Our National Life. Correspondence with Jefferson and Other Members of the American Philosophical Society and with Other Prominent Americans. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 45(2), 87–197. https://doi.org/10.2307/1005770

Schwartz, J. (2021). Robert Brown and Mungo Park: Travels and Explorations in Natural History for the Royal Society. New York: New York Botanical Garden Press.