An award has been made to the National Tropical Botanical Garden under the direction of Dr. David H. Lorence to purchase new cabinets and a mobile storage system for the herbarium at the Garden. The collection comprises more than 57,000 specimens of plants from Hawaii and other islands in the Pacific that is a valuable resource for understanding the biodiversity of the Pacific flora. The collection is actively growing and will soon outstrip the current capacity for storage. The mobile storage system and cabinets will increase the space for potential growth and provide new storage infrastructure for the next several decades. The collection is used extensively by scientists and resource managers to identify native and introduced species of plants and to document plant distributions. Students, teachers, and the public are also offered training opportunities in tropical botany.
