Tonight’s news compilation is mostly meta about the scientific findings and actions. The stories in the first section bemoan losses, while the remainder predominantly are correcting false interpretations and media nonsense.
Nine years ago, I wrote Herbaria Ode and Obituary because I learned that “100 herbaria have closed in the past 18 years and less than half of the top 50 US universities that once offered advanced degrees in botany still do so.” The loss has continued since then, and this week, Duke University herbarium announced it would close down their collection. Here is the NYT article about the closure and the outrage that ensued (paywall removed): Duke Shuts Down Huge Plant Collection, Causing Scientific Uproar
Duke University has decided to close its herbarium, a collection of 825,000 specimens of plants, fungi and algae that was established more than a century ago. The collection, one of the largest and most diverse in the country, has helped scientists map the diversity of plant life and chronicle the impact of humans on the environment.
The university’s decision has left researchers reeling. “This is such a devastating blow for biodiversity science,” said Erika Edwards, the curator of the Yale Herbarium. “The entire community is simultaneously shocked and outraged.”
Lucia Lohmann Herbarium Director @ University of California, Berkeley tweeted in support.
Herbaria are treasure troves of biodiversity that allow us to study the present, reconstruct the past, and make predictions about the future, a crucial skill under climate change.
Here is Medeiros’ tweet thread.
Herbaria, especially university herbarium like DUKE, contribute to the study of biodiversity in two complementary ways. Being an archive for specimens is one of their objectives, but an equally important objective is training scientists.
Duke biology has 5 tenured faculty associated with the herbarium. This by itself isn't unusual. What is quite unique is that only 1 of those professors focuses on flowering plants. Instead, Duke is a hotspot for the often-neglected study of ferns, mosses, lichens, mushroom fungi—something that can be broadly termed "cryptogamic botany." As a training program, the Duke herbarium has been incredibly successful in producing specialists in these understudied taxonomic groups.
The two functions—archiving and training—depend on each other. The value of the archive is continually improved through study from professors, postdocs, grad students, visitors, etc. The training can't happen without specimens to study!
If Duke shuts down this very successful program and sends the specimens elsewhere, the data will be safe—the archiving mission will go to another institution. But the training mission will be lost—just because another place gets specimens, it doesn't mean that they will have the faculty lines, student admissions spots, etc. to take on this aspect of the Duke herbarium mission.
The reason why this threatened closure is so disastrous for biodiversity research is not that the specimens might move. It's that if this goes through, and Duke ceases to be a training center for plant and fungal systematics, we will have a future with even fewer scientists who know how to study the biodiversity of ferns, lichens, mosses, etc, when we know that we already have too few trained systematics/taxonomists for pretty much every branch in the tree of life. Sadly, "Big Duke" and Duke Biology leadership don't see this in itself as a compelling reason to keep the herbarium.
This is where my laptop decided to go on strike so I was unable to add supportive text for the rest.
Got yer yellow-crested helmetshrike right here
Some people are taking steps to encourage more participation in science and scientific collections.