A year in the life of a botany curator at the Natural History Museum | Principal Curator in Charge, Algae, Fungi & Plants – Blogs from the Natural History Museum. The herbarium at the Natural History Museum contains over five million preserved botanical specimens and includes everything from flowering plants, conifers, ferns, bryophytes, algae and lichens. It is one of the largest herbaria in the world. Managed by a team of 13 curators and three herbarium technicians, the Natural History Museum herbarium is the result of the accumulation of botanical knowledge over more than four centuries.
It is the job of the Museum’s botany curators to care for those collections, to make them accessible and to continue developing them – which certainly makes for a rich and varied role. The NHM Herbarium: A Global Hub for Plant Taxonomy and Beyond No two days as a botany curator are the same. In 2003, Vicky Funk wrote an article called 100 Uses for an Herbarium: well at least 72 and the researchers we support each year to use the NHM herbarium are certainly addressing a wide range of questions. Adding to our collections Like this: Like Loading... When is a book not a book? The bound volumes and exsiccatae in the herbarium at the Natural History Museum | Curator of Botany – Blogs from the Natural History Museum.
The botany curation team have recently completed cataloguing some of the more unusual items in their care, the bound volumes and exsiccatae. A dataset listing those collections has been published on the Museum’s data portal. In this blog, Jo Wilbraham, Norbert Holstein and Mark Carine, discuss some of the treasures to be found among the Museum’s extensive collection of botanical bound volumes and exsiccatae.
The vast majority of the Natural History Museum’s 5.25 million herbarium specimens are dried specimens mounted onto herbarium sheets or stored in packets that are filed in a taxonomic order in cabinets. It is a very practical way of managing a botanical collection. Organised in this way, you can easily find all of the specimens belonging to a particular species and if our understanding of species and their classification changes, the collection can be re-curated to reflect our developing knowledge of the natural world. Like this: Like Loading... Bound Volumes and Exsiccatae in the Botanical Collections at the Natural History Museum, London - Data - Data Portal. This dataset provides an overview of the bound volumes and exsiccatae preserved in the botanical collections of the Natural History Museum. For each of the 1320 items accounted for, the title and compiler of the item are provided, together with their Natural History Museum registration number, the subdepartment to which they belong and the curator responsible for the item and to whom enquiries should be addressed.
The Museum’s bound volumes and exsiccatae are held in seven of the botanical subdepartments, six of which have a taxonomic and or geographical focus: Algae, Bryophytes, Lichens and Slime Moulds, Pteridophytes, British and Irish Seed Plants, General Herbarium (i.e. Rest of the World Seed Plants). The other subdepartment is ‘Historical Collections’. The use of bound volumes as a method for the preservation of botanical specimens has a long history. Featured Herbarium: Natural History Museum, London. Research themes.