A grant has been awarded to San Francisco State University (SFSU) under the direction of Dr. Dennis E. Desjardin for partial support of a renovation of the H.D. Thiers Herbarium. Founded in 1959, the herbarium is a national archive containing a world-class collection of fleshy fungi and lichens, and a significant regional collection of vascular plants. The H.D. Thiers Herbarium is the repository for over 138,000 specimens, including 279 type specimens and thousands of specimens from endangered habitats in California, Hawaii and Southeast Asia. SFSU holdings represent one of the world's most extensive and comprehensive collections of California specimens of fleshy fungi, lichens, bryophytes and vascular plants, and the most complete collection of fleshy fungi from the Hawaiian Archipelago, Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia. The renovation incorporates 142 new herbarium cabinets installed on a compactor system, and provides for the accessioning and reorganization of all specimens reflecting recent changes in taxonomy and nomenclature. New cabinets will preserve the specimens from potential insect damage, will allow us to accession a backlog of nearly 17,000 specimens, and will allow for future growth to hold the incoming specimens resulting from ongoing NSF-funded research. A compactor system will allow for an increase of 38 cabinets from our current number without requiring additional space, and will reduce the footprint of the herbarium by 20% providing more room for students and researchers to join the facility. The H.D. Thiers Herbarium is an integral component of the research and education goals of SFSU. In the past five years, 57 SFSU graduate students in plant and fungal systematics and molecular ecology have used the collections upon which their thesis research was based. Specimens and their accompanying data are vitally important to systematists, biogeographers, ecologists and other scientists interested in species distributions, biotic community composition, plant-fungal associations, and temporal and spatial aspects of plant and fungal biology. They provide pertinent historical data to land managers for conservation, forestry, remediation, public parks and other land use concerns. The renovation will assure that the specimens will remain in pristine condition and efficiently accessible for use by students, researchers and the general public.
