A National Science Foundation award to the University of Arizona Herbarium (ARIZ) under the direction of Michelle McMahon will support installation of mobile storage units and provide proper museum storage for more than 50,000 important plant and fungal specimens. The majority of collections awaiting incorporation and protection are identified yet are not filed in the main collection due to lack of space, making them unavailable for research or public service. Material stored outside of museum cabinets is under constant threat from insects, despite vigilant freeze-fumigation.
Specimens awaiting incorporation include scientifically significant collections from preeminent botanical and mycological researchers in the southwestern US and northwest México, as well as unique collections that are global in scope (e.g., morning glories and endophytic fungi). Installation of compactors and associated cabinets will also increase space for public activities, including permanent and rotating displays and workshops on topics such as translational taxonomy, phylogenetics and floristics. The herbarium will continue to recruit students, including those from underrepresented groups, to assist in research, public outreach, reorganizing over 400,000 plant and fungal specimens, and incorporating the valuable backlog into the main collection. This award will allow the highly active UA Herbarium to continue to grow for years to come.
Intellectual merit: This project had as its goal to provide enhanced storage capabilities for the plant and fungal natural history museum at the University of Arizona. Situated in the Sonoran Desert at a crossroads between north temperate and subtropical biomes, the biodiversity of Arizona and its region is extremely high. Preserved specimens range from historical surveys of the then new US-Mexico boundary to modern discovery of plant species in the grasslands of Arizona, mountains of NW Mexico, or fungal symbionts living inside leaves of thousands of different species of plants. These irreplaceable specimens serve to document the geographic range of species, seasons of reproductive activity, and associations with other species — all necessary for understanding changes over the last century or potential changes into the future. The project allowed us to move more than 50,000 specimens from cardboard boxes and wooden cabinets to 188 new metal "herbarium" cabinets. These cabinets provide protection from water, fire, and, most importantly, specimen-eating insects. Prior to the addition of these cabinets, the most susceptible specimens were stored in large plastic bags and periodically rotated through the freezer, a labor intensive situation that did not allow easy access. The collections are housed in a beautifully renovated registered historic building in the center of campus; this helps us maintain a very active public profile, but physical expansion is not an option. This project allowed us to improve the efficiency of our space through the addition of 21 mobile carriages or "compactors." Broader impacts: Facility enhancement has also substantially improved the usefulness of our public space because we moved almost all specimen storage out of this area and onto the new compactors. Daily visitors now view rotating displays on, e.g., the history of the collection facilities and how to preserve a columnar cactus specimen, weekly seminars on biodiversity of the region now easily accommodate up to 40 attendants, and more space is available for popular workshops and tours. For example, Co-PI Arnold conducted a semester-long high school workshop in Spring 2012 on fungal biodiversity with 135 students at Tucson High Magnet School, a large, urban, Hispanic-serving high school; students participated in fieldwork, laboratory research, and Herbarium activities; these activities benefitted from the improved access to specimens and public space provided by this project. This project also provided several unanticipated opportunities. Because the installation of cabinets and compactors (including replacement of several extremely old non-functional cabinets) required the movement of nearly all our specimens, we rearranged the collections according to modern systematic understanding of plant and fungal evolutionary history ("phylogeny"). The arrangement of species into families, and of the families themselves, now matches current books and online resources, making it easier for visitors to locate specimens and to become exposed to evolutionary processes that underlie diversity. A second opportunity grew from this first: because this major rearrangement required the development of bioinformatic resources (database structures and scripts), we developed this capacity and we now contribute significant code and data tables to Symbiota (symbiota.org), a bioinformatic software system in use across the country.
