Summary
Curator, Professor of Botany
Collections Manager
The
Rocky Mountain Herbarium (RM, 1894) with the integrated National Herbarium of
the U.S. Forest Service (USFS, 1910) and the associated Wilhelm G. Solheim
Mycological Herbarium (RMS; 1929) contains the world’s largest assemblage of
plants and fungi from the greater Rocky Mountain region. It contains more than
1,360,000 plant specimens and ranks 10th in the nation of more than
750 herbaria.
The
staff of the RM has developed a philosophy to aggressively inventory the flora
of the Rocky Mountains and adjacent plains and basins. This was necessitated by
the vast, uncollected or under-collected areas. Such areas are remote and often
requiring hikes of 10 to 25+ miles, although many areas are easily reached by
vehicle yet remain unexplored. The result has been a relatively “fine grain”
sampling in order to capture, based on voucher specimens, species distributions
as a whole. In addition, genotypic/phenotypic variation and ecological
differentiation are documented. Impressive yet not excessive numbers of
collections per unit area (4.4 specimens/mi2) have been obtained. The development of new tools through the decades that place
broad-scale floristics into an interdisciplinary framework with biogeography,
ecology, and land management is fortuitous. These include computer hardware and
software advances, GIS applications, informatics, the Internet, website
development, and molecular systematics.
In
1977, the RM initiated this major floristic inventory of the greater Rocky
Mountain region. This inventory is now the largest program of its kind in the
annals of North American botany. More than 74 (48 by MS students) major
floristic studies have been completed; 620,000 new collections have been
obtained for the projected Flora of the Rocky Mountains as well as the Flora of
North America (16 of 31 volumes published by Oxford University Press; the
curator has been on the board of directors since its inception 25 years ago).
The maps show the distribution of floristic inventories and the intensity of
collecting (figures below).
This is a detailed map of
all collecting sites associated with the botanical inventory conducted between
1978 and 2010.
In most cases, a dot represents 50-150+ collections.
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The projects completed during the 1990s
in Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming resulted in the inventory of
79,391 mi2. Most importantly, 414
different species of conservation concern were documented at 1,459 sites, most
of them new. Additionally, projects completed during the 2000s in Arizona,
Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota,
Washington, and Wyoming resulted in the inventory of 89,363 mi2 of
mostly state and federal lands. During this period, 430 different plant
species of conservation concern were documented at 1,678 sites. As many of
the taxa collected during the 1990s had been removed from Natural Heritage
lists prior to 2000, this is even more remarkable.
In 1991, the RM Plant Specimen Database
was initiated. Currently it serves over 700,000 specimen records, 30,000
specimen images, and over 4,000 vouchered field photographs (http://www.rmh.uwyo.edu). In the past
two years, the database has been rebuilt using MySQL. The new web interface is among the best in the field.
We have a memorandum of understanding with UW Library (Imaging Lab, Digital
Collections and Systems Department) for housing and maintaining the website and
database.
The
RM has received four NSF grants in collaboration with regional herbaria for
data basing and more than 70 cost-share agreements with federal agencies for
botanical inventory. These inventories have been conducted in 11 regional states. In the past five years $1,066,885
(not including indirect cost) from 39 grants have been acquired for inventory,
specimen processing, data basing, imaging, and curation. Several of these are in collaboration with the UW Library and
include:
- Data basing/georeferencing of >30,000 specimens of vascular plant species from Arizona and New Mexico at RM/USFS. This complements data acquisition on 45,000 recent collections from north central New Mexico (five projects funded separately by the FS and the BLM) and 6,500 collections from selected areas in Arizona.
- The data basing of 18,000 specimens from BLM lands in Wyoming.
- The imaging/data basing of the 6,500 specimens in the Grand Teton NP herbarium (funded by UW/NPS) (http://www.rmh.uwyo.edu/digitalherbaria/about.php). Likewise the processing/imaging of 8,200 collections at RM obtained recently from the Park. We have completed the imaging of herbaria at Bandelier National Monument (2,000) and the Black Hills cluster (Devil’s Tower, Jewel Cave, Wind Cave, Mt. Rushmore – 4,000+ collections). We have an agreement in place to image the herbaria in the NPS units throughout in their Northern Great Plains region.
- The processing/imaging of 35,000 specimens from recent inventories on Shoshone NF.
- The data basing of RM specimens from the Missouri Plateau (eight of 23 counties in Wyoming and major portions of Montana, the Dakotas, and northern Nebraska; funded by NSF through Black Hills State).
- Imaging/databasing >5,000 nomenclatural type specimens at RM (funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. [A type specimen is one on which the description of a species new to science is based; they are critical to understanding the circumscription of a species.
Additionally,
a proposal to the National Science Foundation is in preparation. It includes a “virtual
herbarium” of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and completion of databasing of
Wyoming specimens at the RM. Thus digitization of RM/USFS specimens from
Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming
will be complete.
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