With their wide-ranging collections of preserved plant specimens, well-curated herbaria represent a vital resource for plant diversity research, enabling the accurate identification and classification of plant materials that underpin any other botanical studies or conservation activities.
Recognising the key position that good curation plays in the ability of any herbarium to function at its fullest potential, the course reviews techniques employed and investigates possibilities to enhance your work, considers international standards and local practices, and investigates ideas to promote your collections to the wider audience beyond the scientific community. This course provides an ideal opportunity for herbarium managers, curators, conservationists or technicians to gain or review skills and experience that will enable them to develop and make use of their own herbaria and natural resources.
The course is usually run over 2 weeks, broken down into several sessions a day and incorporates practical elements. The sessions include:
- Herbarium Management
- Collections management
- Materials
- Purpose and arrangement of herbaria
- Ancillary collections
- Preventative conservation and pest management
- Good and bad practice
- Managing visitors to the herbarium
- Engaging with the public
- Incorporation of specimens into the herbarium
- Implementing a new revision
- Duplicates and loans
- Databasing
- Digitisation
- Mounting
- Data repatriation and exchange
- Dissection and removal of parts
- Essential literature and online resources
- Checklists
- Plant Collection and Preservation
- Equipment for field trips
- How and what to collect
- Different collecting techniques and drying procedures
- Collecting special taxa
- Collecting for ancillary disciplines
- Data and labels
- The Herbarium and Biodiversity Conservation
- CBD and CITES
- IUCN Red Listing
- Introduction to the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation