takes collection online
Alexander Krings, curator of N.C. State University’s herbarium since July, recently faced a botanical Catch-22 type situation.
Access to accurate botanical data through specimen loans is essential to researchers. But when used off-campus, the needed information — the herbarium’s 125,000 preserved, archival-sheet-mounted plant specimens — faces inadvertent degradation or destruction and everyday wear-and-tear.
“Loans are very big in the taxonomy community,” says Krings, a plant taxonomist in the College of Agriculture and Life Science’s Botany Department. “We’ve loaned 700 species in the past six months.”
Although the sheets are delicate, with a few dating back to 1874, sharing them is one of the herbarium’s most important functions. Loans allow taxonomists to compare specimens from throughout a plant’s range, developing a more refined understanding of variations and species limits, and increasing the body of botanical knowledge, says Krings.
Botanical researchers also need a standard of comparison — a type — by which to classify a newly discovered plant or confirm identification of a known one, he says.
“One of the rules governing plant nomenclature is that an author must designate a physical specimen — the type specimen — to serve as a basis for a new species name,” Krings says.
The herbarium’s 28 types and other specimens, most from North Carolina and the Southeast, are flat-stored in 108 steel cases in a climate-controlled 1,125-square-foot room in N.C. State’s Gardner Hall.
One way researchers, faculty and students can access plant information without harm to the specimens is to go online, Krings says.
“A Web presence makes the process a lot easier, because we can do digital loans and researchers can access information on what we actually have to loan and see whom to contact,” he says.
To that end, he recently posted images and labels of all types housed at the herbarium to the herbarium’s Web site: http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/botany/ncsc/index.htm.
Also at the site is information on poisonous plants and both native and cultivated trees, with taxonomic keys, and on floristic research at N.C. State. The site offers links to other online plant collections databases and a searchable catalogue of the 400-volume taxonomic reference library housed at the herbarium.
Recently, Krings also added a work he just published with Dr. Jon Stucky, Common, Woody, Piedmont and Coastal Plain: Wetland Plants of the Carolinas, complete with taxonomic keys and a linked, partially illustrated glossary to plant morphology. Soon he’ll add an online version of a North Carolina Agricultural Research Bulletin, “Plants poisonous to livestock and pets in North Carolina.”
What motivated Krings, not only a Web surfer, but a life-long salt-water surfer, to such efforts?
“Growing up in Charleston, S.C., I surfed a lot,” he says. “Depending on the swell, my buddy and I would often be out there before dawn and well after sunset. You develop a longing to be there that’s difficult to describe.
“Love for the place naturally grew into an interest in keeping the water and beaches clean, which soon developed into a broader interest in the environment,” he says.
Pursuing his interest in environmental issues, he enrolled at N.C. State.
During his undergraduate days, he experienced an epiphany while camping with a college environmental group.
“We were in the Shenandoah Valley, and I looked around and realized I couldn’t identify any trees or a single plant around me. So I bought one of those Golden Guide to Trees books at the park service concession, and that got the ball rolling,” he recalls.
The camping trip sparked an interest that led to two N.C. State degrees: a 1995 bachelor’s in natural resources and a 1998 master’s in forestry with a botany concentration.
Eventually, via a one-year stint as a biologist and head of computer-based projects at Zilker Botanical Garden in Austin, Texas, it led to the curatorship of N.C. State’s herbarium and a Web site that assures researchers and students alike that, by investing a few keystrokes, they’ll never have to look around and not be able to identify our state’s plants.
— Art Latham
