Herbarium

UCR Herbarium founder donates $900K to preserve its future

Anonymous — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 07:16:11 +0000

UCR Herbarium founder donates $900K to preserve its future Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/25/2020 - 23:16 More News Jules Bernstein | UCR News June 08, 2020

UC Riverside’s herbarium, established over 60 years ago, is an irreplaceable library of plant specimens.

Professor Frank Vasek and his wife Maxine.

Now, a $900,000 bequest from its founder Frank Vasek and his wife Maxine will ensure the resource remains available to many generations of future plant scientists, and that it receives needed repairs and reorganization.

Vasek, who started the herbarium with a massive investment of time, energy, and care, wanted to ensure its longevity. It is home to an impressive collection of more than 273,000 plants from the Western Hemisphere, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, some of which are now extinct in the wild. But this collection had a very humble beginning. Asked about its significance for botanical research, herbarium curator Andrew Sanders explained, “We’re the stockroom clerks of the biosphere.”

When Vasek arrived in 1954 — the same year classes first began at UCR — it was supposed to have been on a part-time, temporary basis. An expert in California flora, Vasek was finishing his dissertation when he was hired to teach field botany.

Because the campus was in its nascent stages, the resources he needed for research hadn’t been established yet.

“I became concerned about how I’d teach my course with no herbarium for students to consult,” Vasek said. “It’s a necessary tool for a research scientist, every bit as essential for a botanist as a library is to other types of scholars at a university.”

To fill the gap, Vasek required each of his three students that year to collect 50 plants. At the end of the semester, they donated these collections to Vasek’s metal office storage cabinet, where the herbarium resided for several years.

Visitors will now find a dedicated herbarium space in the southeast corner of campus. But getting it to grow from its initial iteration to its current status as the fourth largest collection of California plants in the world was no easy task.

In those early years, Vasek had to balance building the herbarium with a full load of teaching, conducting botanical taxonomy research, getting published, and trying to become a full-fledged professor.

He also spearheaded the not-small task of establishing the UCR Botanic Gardens, overseeing the first plantings at the 4-acre property, and serving as its first director. Vasek compared his juggling act in those days to being a parent.

“Doing all of that, it was trying at times,” he said. “One doesn’t go through an intense struggle without becoming attached to it — attached for life. I look upon the herbarium as one of my children.”

The analogy is borne of personal experience. Frank and Maxine’s oldest daughter, Cheri, graduated from UC Davis; and the youngest, Cynthia Engel (formerly Vasek), holds three degrees from UCR.

The Vasek family’s campus legacy has many tendrils. Maxine served two years as a graduate plant anatomist, and then worked as a laboratory technician in UCR’s Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology.

Before being hired 40 years ago as the herbarium curator, Sanders was one of Frank Vasek’s students.

“I was always deeply impressed by him,” Sanders said. “He was friendly and encouraging even though he was also scary intelligent.”

Vasek’s prolific career as a research scientist resulted in 50 technical papers and another 50 articles authored for various organizations. However, his own work never came at the expense of his teaching.

“The way Dr. Vasek ran his classes really forced you to think,” said Sanders, noting Vasek challenged him in the best ways during his time as a student in the 1970s. “He was never into rote memorization. He encouraged looking deeply at the natural world and seeing the similarities in the structure of things.”

“He was very committed to education and put a lot more emphasis on teaching than many professors I knew,” Sanders said. “I believe that’s why he’s supporting the herbarium today — it is so key for student learning.”

The herbarium is also a resource for the general public, consultants, and various agencies with questions about plants. Anyone can bring in material and have it identified. Sanders and the rest of the staff are also working to get the entire collection photographed, associated with the correct records, and posted online.

Though there are resources online that can assist with casual plant identification, none of these could replace the herbarium.

“Many online services have tons of misinformation. They aren’t reliable. It’s much better to have a physical collection, which can be checked,” Sanders said. “Also, nobody’s yet worked out a way to extract DNA from digital records.”

The collection boasts many examples of native plants that cannot be found locally anymore, specimens that never used to be seen in North America, and some thought to have gone extinct that were rediscovered.

In addition to assisting with identifications, the staff prepare specimens for inclusion in the collection every day, Sanders said. Vasek’s donation will ensure this work can continue well into the future.

Patricia Springer, professor and chair of UCR’s Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, said the herbarium is an indispensable resource both for the campus and the general public.

“The extensive collection of Southern California plants provides a catalog of rare and endangered species and plays a critical service in identifying plants for the public,” Springer said. “We are so grateful to the Vaseks for this generous gift.”

The bequest is all the more meaningful now as the world navigates such uncertain times. It will ensure this institution, which Vasek worked to raise as if it were one of his own children, will continue helping scientists gain a deeper understanding of the environment.

“The herbarium is an active, lively, and productive operation,” Vasek said, “That’s what I like, and that’s how I want it to stay.”

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UCR helps grow massive plant portal

Anonymous — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 06:52:20 +0000

UCR helps grow massive plant portal Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/25/2020 - 22:52 More News Jules Bernstein | Inside UCR November 23, 2020

UC Riverside’s herbarium is helping create an unprecedented resource for scientists studying how climate change is affecting California’s plants.

The herbarium has joined a consortium of 28 other herbaria, universities, research stations, natural history collections and botanical gardens digitizing their plant collections. By 2022, they will have built a free public database featuring images and detailed data about more than 1 million specimens.

UPDATE!! As of May 16, 2022 we have Imaged 100,500 California Specimens and uploaded them to CCH2

We are 6 weeks ahead of the Project due date and have exceeded our project goal of 100k.

This $1.8 million project was funded by the National Science Foundation to answer questions about whether a warming climate is altering plant flowering and fruiting patterns.

“Some studies suggest flowering time is getting earlier as the climate is getting warmer,” said herbarium director Amy Litt. If blooming shifts, there is the potential for a mismatch between when the flowers are open and when pollinators are active.

“There could be fewer pollinators available for plants, a shortage of nectar for bees to eat, and seeds might not get dispersed,” Litt said. “There are many potential downstream implications of a change in flowering times.”

Though the new portal was designed with climate change questions in mind, the data will also allow scientists to answer many other questions about the state’s native plants.

Along with images of all the specimens, each record will contain information such as who collected the specimen, when they collected it, what plants were growing near it, and whether it had fruit, flowers, seeds or new growth.

In addition, the herbarium staff is working on figuring out precise coordinates of where the plants were collected. “Some of the older specimens have very general ‘five miles north of this spot’ kind of data,” said curator Andrew Sanders.

Curator Andrew Sanders holding specimens from the herbarium's large collection of California flora. (Stan Lim/UCR)

The type of geographic information system mapping the staff is doing with the aid of herbarium volunteer Mike Cohen, is “like old fashioned mapping on steroids, and will allow for phenomenal sorts of analyses,” Litt said. “This map data can be correlated with plant distributions to understand what factors determine where a particular species is found.”

Sanders, a biologist specializing in botany, was hired 40 years ago as the herbarium’s curator. He said a portal like the one he’s now helping build would have been invaluable for his own research.

“If I wanted to know, for example, which plants in Riverside County flower in October, I had no practical way to determine that. With the new database, we can answer that question,” Sanders said. “Now people from anywhere in the world can easily look up all the records on the plants we have here.”

UCR received $75,000 of the total grant to contribute data and images for 100,000 specimens to the portal. The staff is already more than halfway done with the work — a remarkable achievement given the circumstances this year.

“Our small staff worked intensely and with phenomenal commitment to keep us on target, despite a three-month complete shut down,” Litt said.

UCR’s herbarium is the one of the largest in the state. Roughly 60% of its 280,000 specimens are from California, and Sanders would eventually like to add the entire native collection to the database.

“The first 100,000 is hopefully just the beginning,” Sanders said.

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