Rooting through Wheaton's herbarium
By Sandy Coleman
The six-foot tall army-green cabinets in the back of a classroom in the Science Center look like any other generic file cabinets. But approach one and open the doors, and Alexandra ("Lexie") Sabella '08 casually warns: "Be careful. Don't touch the felt, it's lined with poison."
These cabinets hold Wheaton College's herbarium, a collection of more than 100 years of dried plants, pressed between paper and protected by insecticide-lined felt from bugs that might not know the scientific worth of this historical representation of New England's plant species.
Sabella knows everything about these cabinets and the contents because she has spent 10 hours a week for the past two semesters studying the nearly forgotten herbarium as part of an independent study that turned into her senior honors thesis, under the direction of Professor of Biology Scott Shumway.
Sabella, a biology and classics double major, has combed through stacks and stacks of plants, inventoried and cataloged the rare specimens in the collection, discovered 499 specimens of interest, used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map verified rare species from Bristol County (where Wheaton is located), and worked with a botanist from the Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. The botanist is very interested in using her data to broaden the state's records.
"I've gone through the whole herbarium and pulled out the rare specimens. My data are largely historical. The state's data are based on a lot of herbaria put together. But they haven't looked at Wheaton's herbarium. So I have information that they don't necessarily have," said Sabella.
"This is aiding the conservation of these rare and endangered plant species. I'm giving them information about where these species used to be [which offers clues about areas that may need to be re-surveyed and potentially protected]," she said. "In our classes, we talk a lot about getting reliable baselines, a reliable idea of how the ecosystems used to look."
Melissa Dow Cullina, a botanist with the Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program, has been working with Sabella to conceptualize the project and verify the species identification as the student does inventory. The verification validates the data collected and determines whether the plant pressed on each herbarium sheet is a species tracked on the Status List of Massachusetts Rare Plants. Sabella also points out that the verification process allows the information to be shared with the Natural Heritage so that the state may use the data to inform conservation activities.
"The value to the Natural Heritage, specifically, is that the project identifies and communicates to us locations of historic collections of rare plant species," said Cullina. "This is helpful in that it can provide 'leads' on where we can look for these plants today, and it helps us better understand the historical distribution of these rare plant species. The value to the public is that, as with any new information gathered about rare species, it enhances [the Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program's] ability to understand and potentially protect these species.
"I commend Lexie for taking on a project that has real-world conservation applications," Cullina added. "It has been a challenging project that required a special knowledge of plant nomenclature. Lexie has done a very good job sorting through many specimens to determine which are the rare species that [the Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program] is interested in-in some cases, the scientific names of the plants have changed and Lexie needed to be able to figure out and reconcile the old names as compared to the new names we use now."
Sabella, who is president of Wheaton's outdoors club, was drawn to this project after participating in an ecology and conservation study abroad program in South Africa. "We did a lot of fieldwork, including plant collections. I really enjoyed plant identification, particularly the field aspect of it."
Shumway said he has been thinking about how to benefit from the resources of the herbarium since he got here 17 years ago. "Most of the specimens were collected between 1900 and 1940. [Sabella found one plant that dates back to 1890.] And very little has been done with the collection in several decades," he said.
"Historically, almost every college had an herbarium. The problem is that the focus of botany has shifted away from collecting and away from naming and classifying. Now you've got plant ecology, people studying plants in other ways-physiology, biochemistry, molecular biology."
So many herbaria tend to languish until someone shows interest, said Shumway, who was curator of the herbarium for four years at Tufts University during his undergraduate work-study job.
"A lot of institutions are getting rid of their herbaria. So they are either filtering their specimens into other herbaria or just kind of not looking at the data," Sabella noted. "As our technology with GIS is able to look at these distributions and see these comparisons, I think this historical data is going to be really important."
Sabella has put a modern spin on her study and analysis of the herbarium. She said she has used ArcMap (a GIS program) and Internet sources to create data layers of the locations where Bristol County specimens were found to visually compare the locations with the state's data of those species.
Cullina has suggested that Sabella research the possibility of registering the Wheaton herbarium with the Index Herbariorum of the New York Botanical Garden, which formally tracks herbarium collections and assigns an official herbarium acronym to each.
"I had no idea what Lexie was going to find when she started," said Shumway. "This has gone from making a list to realizing, after talking to Melissa, that it's very valuable information. And that it's going to get used. It's not going to just die when Lexie hands in a piece of paper."
And, said Sabella, the experience will be invaluable after she graduates from Wheaton because she hopes to be an outdoor educator in her native California. "There were times when I thought, 'Why am I doing this?' But the bigger picture made it interesting to me. There is a kind of nostalgia working in an herbarium, like being a museum curator. These things are so old. It's cool to know that people from Wheaton were collecting these species from the early 1900s and that these plants have been preserved since then. I really think it's an important part of Wheaton's history."
