An award has been made to the University of Guam under the direction of Dr. Lynn Raulerson for renovations to the Guam herbarium. The institution has a herbarium with 56,000 specimens from Micronesia, with collections of plant specimens from 2,000 islands in the western Pacific scattered across an area the size of the continental United States. Many of the species in the herbarium are found only in Micronesia. These specimens are an important biological record of biodiversity in the region and are used by scientists and resource managers. The project will provide new herbarium cabinets for long term protection of the specimens, upgrade a database to include a backlog of specimens and make the database searchable on the Internet, and provide training to undergraduate students who will assist the curators in the work.
