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Whatever happened to…
the Herbarium?

Carefully documented and stored in row upon row of boxes in a small room – little more than a cupboard – in Otago's Department of Botany is a botanical treasure.

The Otago Regional Herbarium contains more than 70,000 plant specimens, many dating back to the early days of European settlement, and is a resource of national significance.

The Herbarium was founded in the 1950s by then head of department Professor Geoff Baylis, bringing together items from his own personal herbarium and the collection from the Otago Museum. With a strong alpine and southern New Zealand focus, it includes algae, bryophytes (liverworts and mosses), fungi and more than 35,000 vascular plant specimens (ferns, conifers and flowering plants). It also has one of the best lichen collections in the country, many of which are “type” specimens, the first and irreplaceable references for those species.

It incorporates specimens collected by prominent 19th century botanist Thomas Kirk, Otago Museum honorary botanist J. Scott Thompson who undertook extensive botanical expeditions in the Southern Alps in the early 1900s, lichen specialists Dr James Murray and Dr David Galloway, and Emeritus Professor Sir Alan Mark.

Among the many extraordinary specimens are a buttercup collected from Campbell Island in 1874 during a French expedition to watch the transit of Venus, and the first recorded specimen of Cook's Scurvy Grass from the Bounty Islands. Herbarium curator Dr Janice Lord explains that this was found by an Otago student on a voyage to the sub-Antarctic. Now very rare, the grass – Lepidium oleraceum – is a member of the cabbage family and was fed in copious quantities by Captain James Cook to his crew as a preventive for scurvy.

Lord says that today the facility is the country's largest university-based herbarium and the second biggest in the South Island – and it continues to grow. It is a working collection, used as a teaching and research resource, and part of an international network of herbaria.

As a fully compliant CITES-registered and Ministry for Primary Industries-approved plant containment facility, the Herbarium can both send and receive specimens to and from other herbaria around New Zealand and the world.

In addition to providing an invaluable historical record, the Herbarium is also a vital resource for the identification of plant species and documenting plant diversity.

“There are still new species being named using DNA extracted from Herbarium material. The collection provides absolute references for the time and place a plant was collected,” she says.

“It helps us document the distribution and abundance of plant species and provides insight into the types of plants that we might expect to see under different climatic conditions.

“It is also an important resource for helping us to measure the spread of exotic species – particularly weeds – and for plant ecology.”

KAREN HOGG

Banner: Buttercup collected during a 1874 French transit of Venus expedition to Campbell Island.
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