The Biology Department Herbarium, housing nearly 50,000 dried plant specimens, has grown 10-fold since its initiation as a departmental facility in 1975.  Specimens maintained by this unit include unmounted research vouchers from around the world and mounted, accessioned, specimens that document the local flora.  The main herbarium is housed in specially designed, movable plant specimen storage cases in room 009 of Butler Hall.  A smaller assemblage of specimens is maintained as a student reference collection in the nearby Plant Systematics Teaching Laboratory (Butler Hall, room 004).

    Aside from its basic mission of providing support for teaching and research in basic botany, the Biology Department Herbarium also supplies plant identification/information services for the Texas A&M academic community, government agencies, and the public.

    Recent published research by herbarium personnel include a formal description of a new Texas plant species (Agalinis navasotensis - Monique Dubrule Reed, Sida 15: 425-440), a pollen competition study involving the Texas Gourd (Cucurbita texana - Hugh Wilson and Jennifer Payne, American Journal of Botany 81: 1531-1537), and phylogenetic analysis of green plant rbcL gene sequences using DNA extracted from some Texas species (Jim Manhart, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 3: 114-127).  Recent World Wide Web products from the Department of Biology Herbarium include pages associated with Botany 301, Botany 620, The Navasota Flora, the Vascular Plant Image Gallery, and the Flowering Plant Gateway.

    The departmental herbarium facility is one of 24 Texas herbaria. These maintain a combined total of over two million plant specimens which carry detailed information relating to global plant diversity and the plants of Texas. This includes specific distribution records for all taxa (species, subspecies, and varieties) in the state flora (over 7,000), as well as habitat preference, flowering periods, frequency of occurrence, and structural variation. Herbarium specimens also represent a unique historical record of Texas biodiversity. They document collections ranging from initial botanical explorations of the early 1800's, some representing species that are now extinct, through current work on endangered and threatened elements of the state flora. Until recently, this mass of useful information has been 'buried' in herbarium cases throughout the state. Current environmental problems have generated a need for immediate access for regional biodiversity data. Thus, the 'Flora of Texas Consortium', a collaborative group of state institutions, is now moving to establish a cooperative foundation for 'harvesting' this critical information from state herbarium collections and place it, through computerization, in a position of general access; the World Wide Web (WWW) of the Internet. Texas A&M is linked to this enterprise through a collaborative bioinformatics working group which includes the Biology Department Herbarium.

    While relatively small, the Department of Biology stands with the herbarium at Sam Houston State University as the only Texas herbaria with fully computerized specimen data. This local database played a role in initial research concerning methods for converting herbarium specimen label information to electronic form.  It formed the basis for initial, preliminary work in 1994 with Dr. Leland Ellis at the W. M. Keck Center for Genome Informatics of the Texas A&M Institute of Bioscience and Technology, to convert specimen data to full text indices, and subsequent 'specimen data' prototypes developed in collaboration with the Texas A&M Center for the Study of Digital Libraries listed from our home page.

    Initiation with this research was made possible by an Interdisclipinary Research Grant from the Texas A&M Office of Research and Graduate Studies (1995/96).  Further work in botanical informations (1996/97 and 2000/2001) has been supported by Advanced Research Program funding from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. and, for teaching applications, the National Science Foundation's National SMETE Digital Library program.   Hardware, server support, and collaborative applications development is provided by the Texas A&M Center for the Study of Digital Libraries.  User comments/corrections for these WWW pages - always under development - are welcome.

Last updated: 13 December 2000.  Return to Department of Biology Herbarium home page.