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Amid the hustle and bustle of Manila City, within the urban jungle of Sta. Mesa district, there was a school herbarium that only started with a simple dream. It was realized with a simple cabinet made of scraps of wood that became the first storage of herbarium specimens. This was donated by a bunch of good-hearted kids of BS Biology Batch 2014 to store their submitted plant specimens that had been a standard requirement for a number of years for the course subject, Plant Systematics.
The Polytechnic University of the Philippines Herbarium (PUPH) was then constructed as a project output for a floral inventory of the PUP Main Campus in 2015. The collected plants of PUPH were given a small room in the Center of Life Sciences found at the south wing of the Main Building in S-403. This was finally opened to the PUP community upon its blessing in June 2016. But due to the growing collections, PUPH later was transferred to the newly built Engineering and Science Research Center (or ESRC) in a larger room on the 3rd floor in August 2019 that is now under the supervision of the Research Institute for Science and Technology (RIST).
The glass jars display, the carpological collection, customized cabinets, and boxes with labels of different plant families and species names store the initial collections from the PUP Main Campus flora. The plant collections continued to increase with donations of specimens from BS Biology students taking Plant Biology course subjects as well as from field works of undergraduate students and its volunteer faculty curators. The herbarium has a corner that provided a reading area with compendia, field guides, and textbooks with walls of scientific posters and visual displays of plant profiles hoping to further educate visiting students, researchers, faculty, and employees about Plant Biology. Notably, in another corner, you can still find the first wooden cabinet from which that herbarium dream had sprouted from.
VISION
An accessible repository of biological knowledge and archival record of Southern Tagalog regional flora for scientific research and teaching of the general public.
MISSION
The Polytechnic University of the Philippines Herbarium dedicates itself in the pursuit of knowledge and learning of the different plant communities that exist in our environment, particularly of the Southern Tagalog region, whereby promoting perpetuation and conservation of life as an archive of plant collections available to the learners and serves as a resource of educational materials in the botanical discipline accessible to all.
GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
1. To establish, maintain, and expand collections of scientific and heritage value representing the Southern Tagalog region;
2. To utilize science and technology in developing facilities and biological techniques that improve the safety and security of both living and non-living collections in the herbarium;
3. To empower the community through making the collections accessible and its information available for teaching, research, and outreach;
4. To contribute to the enhancement of biological research through services that requires plant taxonomy, bioprospecting, and specimen loans; and,
5. To provide supplemental training in research and education in Plant Sciences that will foster the application of biological knowledge and practices for museum or herbaria work.
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