University of Cincinnati student Olivia Leek is showing me a small, prickly plant in a plastic bag.
"My favorite specimen is just kind of silly; doesn't really have a deep backstory to it," she explains. "It's one of our type specimens — a cacti."
Leek is the collections manager for UC's Margaret H. Fulford Herbarium. When a researcher found this rare Blue Diamond Cholla Cactus in Nevada in 1939, it was a new discovery.
"[A type specimen] is one of the specimens used to describe a species when it was new to science," Leek says.
The cactus is one of more than 125,000 specimens in this vast archive of mushrooms, wood samples, mosses, leaves and more.
They're housed in a room with head-high metal cabinets on rollers. Inside are shelves with seemingly all the wonders of the plant kingdom in boxes, bags and on archival paper. Wood samples from Brazil circa the 1940s. Pinecones the size of my head from California. Liverworts from Antarctica.
Leek played a big role in organizing these samples when the herbarium moved from Crosley Tower to Rieveschl Hall a few years ago.
The breadth and depth of the herbarium's collection is dazzling. But it's more than a curiosity. It helps scientists understand our local landscape, and others far afield, by cataloguing life forms most people rarely pay much attention to.
A peek into the past, courtesy of plants
UC assistant professor Eric Tepe is the herbarium's curator. He says the oldest specimens here date back to 1817.
About half the collection is from Greater Cincinnati. Tepe says it can tell us a a lot about what the local landscape used to look like.
"There were vast fields of Pink Lady's Slipper Orchids in Northside, for example," he says. "Northside was a big wetland at the time. As far as we know, they don't occur in Hamilton County anymore. We paved over all their habitat and dried up the wetlands. A lot of interesting flora that was more delicate and is globally rare at this point was once abundant here and is now gone."
The specimens also offer clues about where we're heading because of climate change and other habitat shifts.
"There are things that are from the South, for example, or maybe from the Great Plains, that weren't here when this was a forested state," he says. "Now that we've removed the forests, elements have moved here from the Plains or up from the South as temperatures get warmer."
Renowned researcher Margaret Fulford founded the herbarium in 1927. Prominent Cincinnatians like Spring Grove Cemetery co-founder Robert Buchanan gathered some of the samples here in the 19th century. Tepe says the collection also benefited from one of the biggest names in botany.
"The famous ecologist E. Lucy Braun — who was here at UC for her whole career — many of her collections are here," Tepe says. "She sent the majority of her collections to the Smithsonian, but we have 1,600 or so."
Two high-tech photo boxes purchased with National Science Foundation grants are helping the herbarium digitize its archive so it can share specimens with the roughly 700 other herbaria across the country.
UC's herbarium is the third largest in the state. Miami University's Willard Sherman Turrell Herbarium has more than 660,000 specimens and the Ohio State University Herbarium has roughly half a million. Even though it is smaller, UC's collection plays pivotal scientific roles.
Tepe says scientists use the specimens for a number of things. Archeologists who find a wooden structure and want to know what kind of tree it was made from, for example. Or environmental researchers tracking how climate change is affecting flora.
"We're in this era of big herbarium data, where you can pull all these collections from herbaria all over the place," he says. "Our small collection fills a lot of important gaps the big collections don't have. When you pull all that together, you can start to look at these big patterns over time and over space. And a group from California has documented exactly that — earlier flowering times, earlier leafing out and things like that."
The herbarium is a working research facility, so it's not open to visitors. But Leek and Tepe are quick to point out they're always looking for volunteers — a tempting prospect if you're looking to meet your favorite rare cactus.
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