Click here to access the John F. Lewis Herbarium database
Our department's herbarium is used to store pressed, mounted, and identified plant specimens for use in several of our classes, including BIO 125: General Botany, BIO 336: Plant Taxonomy, and ENS 475/775: Wetlands Ecology.
In January 2002, much of the herbarium was poorly organized. Several work-study students (Brandon Ludrosky, Joe Waggett, and Scott McBurney) helped organize existing species, genera, and family folders during the Spring 2002 semester. After these initial efforts, 87 families were represented and properly organized. However, many specimens were still unclassified in two herbarium cabinets and scattered throughout several laboratories. These specimens were properly filed in December 2002/January 2003, and 39 families were added to the original 87 for a total of 126 represented families.
In January 2003, Adam Hnatkovitch and Joe Waggett started helping to mount, identify, and label specimens that had been collected and "stockpiled" over the last 25 years by past students and faculty. In February 2003, we also started repairing and confirming the identification of all previously mounted specimens. Specimen data are currently being added to the new herbarium database (details below).
JFL Herbarium goes "international": In May 2003, two specimens of Vincetoxicum nigrum (formerly Cynanchum nigrum) were lent to Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada's DAO (Department of Agriculture, Ottawa) Vascular Plant Herbarium (http://res2.agr.gc.ca/ecorc/dao/index_e.htm) for use in a research project documenting the geographic distribution of this invasive species.
During the Fall 2002 semester, each student in the BIO 336: Plant Taxonomy class was required to properly collect, preserve, and label specimens of 20 different plant species from at least ten different families.
Under the direction of Paul Sible (Mathematics & Computer Science Dept.), several CalU students in a CSC 101: Microcomputers and Application Software class (Darci Abraham, Mark Briner, Judy Panian, Elizabeth Wilde) created a MS-Access database in which herbarium specimen data could be entered and organized.
Plant Taxonomy students subsequently entered their plant collection data in the database near the end of the semester.
The database can now be searched by a number of variables, such as family, genus, city, county, and state:
Click here to access the John F. Lewis Herbarium database