Herbarium
About the University of Sheffield Herbaria:
The Sheffield University herbarium is a collection of ~12,000 dried plant samples spanning 170 years of floral history across the British Isles and beyond. This underused and undervalued resource had the potential to be used in active research as well as act as a historical bank but had falling into disrepair. To rectify this, a digital catalogue was created, increasing access of the collection for use by researchers, as well as enabling active donations. This collection has also been curated and maintained, with degraded specimens cleaned and remounted. New donations have also been mounted and recorded. This has proved important to the university in improving understanding of Plant Science and the place of herbaria within science, a much-maligned resource at teaching level.
The catalogue documents the contents of the British collection thus far. This data is now accessible by permission of the School of Biosciences through work by a voluntary herbarium curator. This catalogue is to locate specimens within the collection, provide geographical data in understanding species distribution and map travels of important botanical collectors. You can view a summary of our collection from our INDEX HERBARIORUM page.
Physical access to the samples is encouraged and can be done via contacting biosciences@sheffield.ac.uk or gavin.thomas@sheffield.ac.uk and can be granted by the School of Biosciences. Loaning forms should be submitted if material is being removed from the herbarium and donations can be submitted to the School of Biosciences along with the donations form found on ORDA.
What is a Herbaria?
Herbaria are collections of dried plants, often preserved as pressed specimens mounted on paper and stored according to their genus and species names within a collection. Herbaria also store identification vouchers crucial to active Plant Science research; plants collected in the field for analysis must be retained for follow up research and peer review if necessary. These centres of research and education exist as holding places for dried plants providing the opportunity for accessing plants across various environments for research.
To increase accessibility, many herbaria now also have a digital catalogue. This can be used virtually to access biogeographic information, dates and species type. Whilst improving distanced understanding of collections, digitisation also improves ease of locating specific specimens within collection for loaning by curators.
Importance of Herbaria collections
Plant preservation has also opened doors for molecular taxonomic research using next generational sequencing of preserved specimens in evolutionary studies and samples retain indicators of atmospheric pollution. Herbaria samples are also often used in ethnobotanical studies, highlighting people’s relationship with plants and samples are studied to understand changing phylogeny in climate change. Herbaria also act as banks of biogeographic information regarding the species diversity and distribution of plants. This data is used to map previous distributions according to date and area and can be used to understand landscape change. As an important ecological resource that can be used in rewilding and rare species mapping, an herbarium provides insight into previous populations enabling the avoidance of shifting baseline syndrome and protecting biodiversity.
In our herbarium we contain preserved specimens, seed banks, photo albums and information keys/books.
We also keep maintenance and repairs kits with the herbarium alongside dataloggers to review temperature and humidity.
Digitisation project (ongoing)
Kane and Emily who volunteer at the museum are working with the University Library team to digitise a portion of the Herbarium in a pilot project to develop a workflow for future large scale digitisation efforts.
The pilot project will focus on honouring the contributions of Miss Comber to our collection in the 19th and 20th century. Specifically looking at samples collected within the Yorkshire and Humber area.
