Matthew Austin twists a huge gear at the end of a large gray library-stack style shelf in a room filled with many more just like it.
This is an herbarium — essentially a specialized library that contains millions of dried plants, collected by humans around the world over hundreds of years. This one at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis is among the largest in the world.
The tall compactors slide open, revealing shelves on either side filled with hundreds of manila folders. Austin, a curator of biodiversity data at MOBOT, flips through pages of dried plants and reads labels from as far back as 1894.
Like many scientists, Austin knows that climate change is affecting when flowers bloom – sometimes throwing them off by weeks.
“We know that flowering is highly controlled by temperature,” Austin said. “The herbarium struck me as a really powerful tool to address this.”
Austin, who published the changes he found in a recent paper, is among a growing number of scientists who say these plant libraries are essential for understanding climate change. The plant collections hold key information about biodiversity loss and potential adaptations. But many are worried about the health of these institutions, and in some places, their future is in question.
Threat of closure
Early last year an announcement sent waves through the botany community — Duke University planned to get rid of its herbarium, a collection of more than 800,000 specimens.
“I was called into the dean's office and told that the herbarium was dead,” said Kathleen Pryer, the director of Duke’s herbarium and a professor of biology.
The announcement spurred an uproar from the scientific community. Some condemned the decision in letters and publications. More than 20,000 people signed a petition asking the university to reconsider.
“The outrage was very remarkable and I think it stunned the Duke administration into silence,” Pryer said.
A year later, Pryer said it’s still not clear what’s going to happen. Duke’s communications team did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Duke news was a warning shot heard throughout the herbaria community, said Barbara Thiers, director emerita of the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium and a research associate at the Denver Botanic Garden. She was shocked to learn that an herbarium as big as Duke’s is on the chopping block.
“It felt like a slap in the face at a time when we are all trying so hard to document biodiversity and to understand it as we face the environmental challenges that we're facing,” Thiers said.
Thiers tracks the number of herbaria around the world. Overall, she says their health is a mixed bag. There are both closures and a growing number of collections around the world.
“The story is not as simple as numbers,” she said. “It's really more about the herbaria that exist, how well they're being taken care of. And there are a number of things that are worrisome.”
Herbaria are vulnerable to the whims of the institutions that house them, Thiers said. At a time when federal funding for education and research is in question, she said the future is uncertain. And she points out the federal government alone has 85 herbaria with about 7 million specimens.
“I feel like we're always just on the brink of disaster, a major herbaria closing,” Thiers said. “But fortunately, it hasn't happened yet.”
Smaller herbaria have closed around the country, including the University of Missouri’s in 2015. When that happens, the orphaned plants aren’t typically thrown away, but are instead incorporated into other collections. That can be challenging for the larger herbaria that take them on.
Iowa State University’s herbarium is one that has grown in recent decades, because of the closure of other plant libraries. About 20 years ago, it took in the University of Iowa’s collection of about 220,000 specimens, said Iowa State University Herbarium Director and Professor Lynn Clark.
“We grew 50% kind of overnight,” Clark said, “and so that's all been incorporated. But over the last year or two, the University of Northern Iowa made a similar decision.”
The University of Northern Iowa’s herbarium closure put about 50,000 more specimens in Iowa State University’s care.
“It's important to make sure that all of these are taken care of,” Clark said. “Not that we like to see herbaria closing, but we can't just let them be mothballed either.”
Clark said there seems to be a message that university administrators and the powers that be are missing — that these collections are a vital basis for important research.
“Part of it is on us to educate our administrators and our colleagues about the importance of herbaria, because I think that is sometimes why these herbaria are not valued and why they may be shut down,” she said.
Clark is working to do more outreach to the public, by bringing herbarium specimens to events like George Washington Carver Day. The Iowa State University herbarium has hundreds of the famous plant scientist’s specimens.
And Clark said innovations in technology are constantly expanding the potential for how herbaria can be used in research.
“Twenty years ago, we weren't even thinking about this, but now we can actually learn so much more than we thought from all these old specimens just from looking at their DNA,” Clark said.
New technologies
The scientists at the Missouri Botanical Garden hope a new injection of money could lead to more breakthroughs in how herbaria collections can be used. The garden recently received a $14.4 million anonymous grant to digitize its entire collection and create a new plant identification tool built with artificial intelligence trained on the garden’s records.
When a new plant specimen makes its way to an herbarium, it can take a long time to just figure out what it is, said Jordan Teisher, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden herbarium.
“There is not a person alive who can identify every species of plant,” Teisher said. “To give you a comparison, there's about as many species of grass alone as there are birds total.”
The garden is creating a new tool that will be able to consult the huge database of plants to exponentially speed things up.
“Being able to narrow it down like that so quickly will really help expedite identification, which then subsequently expedites the conservation work that we need to have done,” Teisher said.
The garden’s scientists have almost science-fiction-like aspirations for where this could lead. They imagine quick scans of jungles and other natural landscapes that could tell them not just which plants are growing there, but also if they are healthy or not.
“Our lives are based on plants,” Teisher said. “They are our food, our medicines, our building materials. They are critical supporters of habitats, in terms of ecosystem services that people use. And we are losing that biodiversity at a rate that is faster than we can assess how important it was before it was gone.”
Teisher hopes this new effort will speed things up, to help scientists learn about the at-risk plants and their ecosystems, before it’s too late.
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
