In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

xv BACKGROUND OF FLORISTIC WORK IN COLORADO William A. Weber Herbaria Our knowledge of floras have their beginnings with the collecting of botanical specimens. Fortunately the habit of establishing herbaria, collections of dried plants, began long ago, perhaps in Italy. Reports not backed up by specimens in an herbarium are useless hearsay. These collections must be guarded from abuse, carelessness, and destruction by wars, for the very basis of our knowledge of plants rests on these. The actual specimen upon which a plant name is based is called a type specimen. Linnaeus’ type specimens are deep underground in a bombproof vault in London. At the very end of hostilities in World War II the specimens of monocots that were carefully saved in caves by the curators of the Vienna Museum herbarium were discovered by American soldiers. It was a day for celebration, so those priceless specimens , thousands of them, were burned. Perhaps the greatest tragedy was the destruction of the Berlin herbarium during a bombing raid in March 1943. Accidents will happen, but as scientists we are bound to try to preserve what we can. The local herbarium should be available to amateurs, government workers, and conservationists as a source of reliable information. Serious students should be encouraged to use the facility and volunteer their services. Documentary collections should be considered vital archival materials, and must not be allowed to deteriorate even if their use decreases as emphasis on other disciplines increases. Detailed information should be maintained for local floras, and the label data should be put online so that it is practicable to trace state records to specimens. The University of Colorado Herbarium maintains a database providing the complete label data and a checklist for each of the 67 Colorado counties. The latter is an indispensable tool for the fieldworker, and, if space is at a premium, county lists will prevent cluttering the herbarium collections with superfluous common specimens. Many herbaria are available online, but as yet there is no central database for all herbaria. The University of Colorado Herbarium (COLO) It was many years before there was a large enough herbarium in Colorado to be considered important. In the early 1900s Colorado State College and the Colorado Historical Society each had a small herbarium. The University of Colorado Herbarium was established in 1946. It now contains over 300,000 vascular plant specimens, 112,000 lichens, 118,000 bryophytes, and smaller collections of algae, fungi, and slime molds, and is well known internationally. When I came to Boulder, I immediately made my first visit to the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. When the director, Dr. Hugo Rodeck, asked me what I wanted to do at Boulder, I replied, “I would like to build an herbarium.” His answer was “Do we need one?” Herbaria in those days rarely found a home in a museum but belonged to a teaching department of botany. Colorado had no botany department. At the time, the attic of the museum building did contain an herbarium, but it was the personal property of Joseph Ewan, who had left Colorado during World War II to join other botanists seeking new sources of quinine in South America. Because Ewan didn’t receive the PhD, he was not invited back to Boulder, but moved to Louisiana, where he became the century’s most renowned historian of American botany. He shipped his herbarium back to Tulane University. The Colorado Historical Society donated their small herbarium of collections made by Alice Eastwood in the 1880s. She had been a teacher of classics at a Denver high school. Those precious specimens formed the tiny nucleus of what would become the University of Colorado Herbarium in 1946. xvi Background of Floristic Work in Colorado It was obvious that several things had to be done. For teaching purposes we needed to have an herbarium housed in the Museum and to ensure continuous curatorship and growth. Francis Ramaley, Professor of Biology at Boulder from 1898 to 1942, had collected ecological specimens; many of them were poor in quality, the collection was limited in scope and contained many duplicates. These were temporarily housed in the Museum by the Biology Department, but did not constitute an herbarium. The Museum had no tenure-track faculty. The staff consisted of a director, the departmental secretary, and the preparator. Anyone else who worked in the museum did so on a volunteer basis. I was an instructor in the Biology Department and became a faculty member of the museum...

Share