Herbaria and plant collecting... Importance of field images!

I'm fixin' to upload several of my plant collections!

I worked for a phenomenal organization, BRIT (Botanical Research Institute of Texas), and I was quite lucky to go out and collect herbarium specimens and add to their already existing 1 million dried plant specimens. I learned so much about plants as I was out collecting and then back at the herbarium filing said collections! Well, as you collect a plant specimen, colors fade after some years and many times, the plant is too large to fit on a single page of herbarium paper... This is why field images are a great addition to physical collections.

As I upload these field images, I will put the specimen name/number in the description. Duplicate specimens have the same name/number.

You can learn more about plant collecting here:
http://royalbotanicgarden.org/page/how-collect-plants

A few additions to plant collecting -- I always made sure that it was a sustainable population of plants! Fortunately, I didn't collect anything extraordinarily rare. Also, I had special permits to collect at many of these locations. David Riskind of Texas Parks and Wildlife gave special permission to BRIT to collect in specific Texas State Parks. I collected duplicates of all specimens to send to the herbaria at New York (NY) and University of Texas (TEX).

You'll see that many of my collections are of common and some non-native, invasive plants. As noted in the last journal entry, every single little observation/collection adds a data point to the growing spreadsheet of knowledge. :)

Please let me know if you have questions on plant collecting! It's a great way to learn the names! :)

הועלה ב-דצמבר 8, 2014 07:30 אחה"צ על ידי sambiology sambiology

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Hi Brenda!

Thank so much for that message! I've checked out your blog and really enjoy it! Great photographs. I'm still learning how to photograph... So many of my observations on here are accompanied with poor photos... Ah well. Hopefully they're still a bit useful. :)

Come spring, I would LOVE to come visit your place! I'm a big plant fan, but I, like you, enjoy all aspects of nature. I'm loving iNat because it's teaching me all of these new critters!

Also, if you're ever in/around Mansfield, let me know! I'll show you around the nature park where I work. Actually, in spring, I'm going to try to do a 'Bioblitz' at the nature park and will incorporate iNaturalist as our "data collecting tool." :) Stay tuned for more exciting details.

Oh yeah, please let me know if I can help you out with any plant ID's. I'm far from an expert, but I do enjoy trying to figure out which species are which. :)

פורסם על-ידי sambiology לפני יותר מ 9 שנים

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