CMU Herbarium

For those of you who don’t know what an herbarium is, it is an archive for plant biodiversity.  They provide voucher specimen and information about them, some can be 50+ years old.  The Central Michigan University herbarium includes more than 26,000 plant specimens.  Their website even teaches proper technique and what materials to use to press and preserve a specimen.  They are even working on digitizing the collection into a Great Lakes species on-line resources.

The information in the CMU herbarium helped enhance my experience in the field because I able to look at voucher specimens of typical rich conifer swamps so that I will be able to identify them in the field.  This also helped me understand and see adaptations and characteristics of plant species for a conifer swamp.

The labels on the herbarium specimens are very important.  Proper labels not only include the latin and common name but also information about where the plant was found, what it looked like in the field before it was collected and pressed, and what the surrounding environment looked like.  This is very helpful because I could know where the specimen was taken from and how long ago.  Looking at herbarium specimens from different years can help to build a timeline of how a species changed over time and can give you an idea of how long a species has been seen in a location or when it was seen before it went extinct from that location.  I noticed that some specimens I looked at were actually collected from my location.  The herbarium specimens could be important to researching how composition could change from hardwoods taking over the rich conifer swamp.  This could be by understanding past transitions of rich conifer swamps to hardwood swamps so that the future of the focus area could be predicted.