It's taken more than 130 years for the Ada Hayden Herbarium to accumulate
over 430,000 dried and pressed plant specimens.
In one fell swoop that number will increase by about half.
In the coming months, the Hayden Herbarium will be the recipient of approximately
235,000 plant specimens from the herbarium at the University of Iowa as
that institution closes down its herbarium operations. For more than a
year, the two herbariums have been in discussions to bring the University
of Iowa collection to Ames.
"This is a pretty exciting opportunity," said Lynn Clark, professor
of botany and the director of the Hayden Herbarium since 1989. "Their
plant specimens will be a welcome addition to our collection."
The Hayden Herbarium is a large mine of data. It currently ranks 18th
in term of size of the collection among university herbaria in the nation.
It is also within the top 30 overall in size of more than 600 U.S. herbaria,
including those at botanical gardens and museums, including the Smithsonian
Institution.
When the University of Iowa collection is added, Clark says that the Iowa
State herbarium will rank in the top ten of all university herbaria and
in the top 20 in overall size.
The current general collection of the Hayden Herbarium includes flowering
plants (angiosperms), conifers (gymnosperms), ferns (pteridophytes), mosses
and liverworts (bryophytes), algae and lichens, fungi, Iowa’s vascular
plants, grasses from throughout the Western Hemisphere, and legumes from
North America.
"Some of the Hayden collections are very important," said Clark.
"We have the biggest collection of Iowa plants and fungi in the world."
Clark estimates that nearly all of Iowa’s estimated 2,000 species
of ferns, conifers and flowering plants are included in the herbarium.
That collection will only increase with the additions from the University
of Iowa.
"Their Iowa collection strongly represents plants from the eastern
portion of the state," Clark said.
Clark and Deb Lewis, Hayden Herbarium curator, recently went to Iowa City
and took a couple of days to go through the University of Iowa collection.
Clark says that once they compared that collection to the Hayden Herbarium,
there was little duplication in specimens.
"We're not looking at much duplication between the two collections
at all," Clark said, "but as soon as we combine the collections,
we'll take out the duplications and send them to other herbariums."
Before that can be accomplished, however, work has to be done on the Hayden
Herbarium physical space. The facility is nearing capacity, but Clark
is hopeful that a grant from a National Science Foundation (NSF) program
could aid in the herbarium's expansion.
A new storage system would allow the specimens to be placed on moveable
tracks that would allow an increased capacity of almost 40 percent.
"A major advantage of the merger is that the Iowa collections will
be centralized and more easily accessible, especially as we database the
information contained in the specimens," Clark said.
