A year in the life of a botany curator (2024)

The NHM Herbarium: A Global Hub for Plant Taxonomy and Beyond

No two days as a botany curator are the same. In part, that is due the tremendous range of enquiries we receive from researchers concerning the collections that we care for. Facilitating researcher access is an important part of a curator’s work and the long history of the Museum’s herbarium and its broad geographical scope mean that we receive requests from colleagues across the world. Last year, as a team, we received 543 collections-related enquiries and hosted 220 visitors for a total of 345 visitor days – and those users came from more than 50 different countries.

In 2003, Vicky Funk wrote an article called100 Uses for an Herbarium: well at least 72and the researchers we support each year to use the NHM herbarium are certainly addressing a wide range of questions. The majority – more than three quarters – are focused on taxonomy, the science of describing and naming species. Globally, more than 2,000 new species of plant are described each year and herbaria such as that at the Natural History Museum are a vital resource for that task.

But, we also have users interested in the evolution of plant diversity and those investigating how plants are used and how they have been domesticated. The herbarium is an increasingly important resource for studying change, providing a physical record of changes in distributions and even extinction of species and it is also an important tool for assessing the conservation status of plants.

Some researchers visiting the herbarium come from disciplines outside of the biological sciences: around ten percent of our users last year were interested in the history of collections and their global and colonial contexts; the herbarium is also used by artists and writers. A herbarium can be a meeting place for researchers from across disciplines and that can make for interesting conversations and new ways of looking at the specimens we care for.

Technological advances are allowing researchers to use the collection in entirely new ways, often in ways that the original collectors of the specimens could never have imagined. We receive increasing numbers of requests for the use of our collections for electron microscopy or for genetic analyses. These typically require a very small amount of tissue to generate a huge amount of data but each request needs to be carefully considered by the team. Our specimens can sometimes allow unique insights into a particular research question – because of where or when they were collected – as was the case in a recent study of the domestication of breadfruit in theCaribbean.

As well as dealing with researcher enquiries and visits, we also support research through making loans to other herbaria to allow detailed study of specimens. Last year, we loaned over a thousand botanical specimens to other institutions for critical study.

Making Our Plants Accessible: The Challenges and Opportunities of Digitizing Herbaria

Increasingly, herbaria exist both as physical collections in cabinets and as virtual, digital collections, accessible via the web from anywhere in the world. As a result, digitization, to make our collection freely accessible to users outside of the Museum, and maintaining and improving those digital data is an important part of our work and we work closely with our colleagues in the Museum’sDigital, Data and Informatics Themeto deliver this.

Our digitized botanical collections are made available through the NHM’sdata portaland last year, more than 68,000 new records were added to that dataset meaning that information on more than one million of the Museum’s herbarium specimens is now digitally accessible. The curatorial work we undertake in preparing collections for digitization is also really important, helping to ensure that the physical specimens are maintained to a high curatorial standard, with our herbarium technicians playing an important role in helping to address conservation issues.

Digitizing collections such as seed plant or fern herbarium sheets follows well-established and relatively straightforward workflows. Other parts of the herbarium present more of a challenge. A major focus for curators at the moment, working with our digitization specialists, is to work out how we should digitize our collection of over two million bryophytes, algae, lichens and slime moulds. It is less straightforward when the key taxonomic characters can be microscopic and there can be many specimens on a single herbarium sheet, with those specimens often enclosed in tiny boxes or packets… We are currently working on a series of pilot projects to work out how best to tackle these.

Our large collection of microscopic diatoms also demands a different approach. Many of our diatom samples are on slides (although some are in bottles and some on herbarium sheets as well). Last year, we completed a project to share 80,000 diatom specimens in our slide collections and these are now also available to everyone on thedata portal.

The NHM herbarium has a large and significant collection of specimens dating from the 17thand early 18thcenturies. With many specimens bound into large volumes or preserved in small, sealed boxes catalogued in an early 18thcentury manuscript, it is a part of the collection that presents particular digitization challenges and demands bespoke approaches.

Last year, we completed a project to digitise Hans’s Sloane’s collection of Vegetables and Vegetable Substances. A newdatasethas made this unique and extraordinary collection of seeds, plant parts, balms, and botanical curiosities digitally accessible for the first time. We also published adatasetdocumenting the bound volumes and exsiccatae in the herbarium that, collectively, represent over 400 years of collecting history. Ablogdescribing that dataset was publishedhere.

Collaborating with Partners: Enhancing Our Datasets of Plant Diversity

Much of the digitization we undertake is focused on making our collections discoverable, allowing users to search our collections digitally in much the same way that they would search the physical collection during a visit. Sometimes though, our work is developing richer datasets of particular parts of the collection for specific uses.

Last year, we published a newdatasetof the specimens sent from Saint Vincent to Sir Joseph Banks by Alexander Anderson. These came to the botanical collections after Banks’s death in 1820. It was part of an interdisciplinary research project entitledUnearthing the contribution of indigenous and enslaved African knowledge systems to the Saint Vincent Botanical Garden under Dr Anderson (1785-1811), a collaboration with Winchester University, the University of the West Indies (Barbados), the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Linnean Society, Antonio Carluccio Foundation and Museum Detox.

We have a long-standing partnership with the Botanical Survey of India, with whom we continued to develop ourPlants of South Asia Datasetthat now includes more than 70,000 specimens from the region and that continues to be expanded and enhanced.

Our digital collection of type specimens was also further enhanced last year. These are specimens that are of particular importance in ensuring the correct naming of species. We have documented more than 151,000 type specimens to date in our herbarium but more are discovered every year. Last year we added a further 685 type specimens to the dataset – all fully databased and imaged. Our visiting experts play a huge role in this process. They benefit from access to our collection but equally importantly, our collection benefits from their expertise and the improvements to the collection and the new discoveries within it that they make. They help us to enhance the collection for future users.

Adding to our collections

The curator’s job is not just about working with our current collections. Developing the collection through adding new specimens is also an important part of the role. Last year, we acquired 8601 specimens, including more than 4500 mosses and liverworts from the UK which significantly enhanced our holdings of recent UK bryophytes. We also acquired over 900 seaweeds from South Georgia from a Museum-led research project on the marine diversity of this unique Antarctic archipelago.

Our herbarium technicians are responsible for preparing those new collections to be incorporated into the herbarium. With a strong focus on digitisation, we now also ensure that every specimen is databased and imaged as part of that process, ensuring that it is digitally available as soon as it is incorporated into the collection.

The Many Roles of a Botany Curator: From Collections to Communication

Facilitating access to our collections, ensuring they are well maintained, developing our digital collection and building our collections to support future research are the core of what we do as curators but we are also involved in many other activities.

We support our colleagues in public engagement, helping with exhibitions and giving talks and tours. Sometimes we are involved in fieldwork, making new collections. Last year, botany curators undertook fieldwork in the UK, Switzerland, the Canary Islands, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

As curators, we are experts in the organisms we curate. For some botanical groups, we are the only expert at the NHM. We are involved in research projects and in training the next generation of scientists through supervising students at both Masters and Doctoral level. We communicate our research as published articles in journals and in talks and posters at scientific conferences and meetings both in the UK and more widely. We also play a role in scientific citizenship – though work on the councils of a wide array of scientific societies and on the editorial boards of journals.

The word curator comes from the Latincuraremeaning to care. The stereotypical curator is perhaps someone hidden away alone in a store, tending their dusty collection… The reality could not be more different. Caring for the Museum’s herbarium, making those collections accessible, developing them for current and future users – is the core of what we do but it is very much a team game.

Over the course of a year, a botany curator will be working with a wide range of people – from our fantastic team of volunteers, to our colleagues across the Museum and the wider botanical community who all contribute to the maintenance and development of the unique botanical collections in our care.