UC's botany collection goes digital

University of Cincinnati biologist Eric Tepe opened a folder on his desk to reveal a flower that was plucked on a spring day in 1884.

“This is running buffalo clover. It does really well when there’s some disturbance in the soil. So in bison tracks, it would have been abundant,” Tepe said.

Famed Cincinnati botanist Curtis Lloyd (one of the founders of the Lloyd Library and Museum) plucked the clover from a field around Cincinnati on June 3, 1884. That year Alaska became a U.S. territory and readers settled down to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Lloyd’s plant collection came to UC's McMicken College of Arts and Sciences decades later. And for years, the faded, pale flower sat on its acid-free paper in a humidity-controlled cabinet alongside the more than 100,000 other plants, fungi and mosses that make up UC’s herbarium. It remained in the dark largely unnoticed for the past 134 years.

Institutions across the United States are doing likewise to share their collections, usually in regional collaborations. UC is part of the Consortium of Midwest Herbaria and is working with Miami University to help catalog lichens, fungi and mosses. The goal is to make these valuable resources more accessible to scientists studying everything from climate change to biodiversity.

Eventually, UC will add its collection of vascular plants such as the white and purple flower that caught Lloyd’s eye.

Running buffalo clover began to disappear across much of the West with the wide scale slaughter of buffalo. Today, the clover is federally protected as an endangered species. So UC’s specimen is especially valuable for researchers.

The flower was shipped to the University of Kansas, where botanist Ralph Brooks studied it while writing his 1984 book “Flora of the Great Plains.” Later, Miami University botanist Michael Vincent examined it. Both botanists added a notation to the specimen label agreeing with Lloyd’s original identification.

Tepe said UC’s herbarium offers a bonanza of noteworthy specimens to botanists around the world. Dozens of scientists visit UC’s herbarium each year to study its collection. UC and other institutions also lend their specimens to each other for various scientific studies. (This practice inadvertently resulted in disaster earlier this year when Australian customs officials, wary of invasive species, intentionally destroyed a collection of priceless 200-year-old specimens from France en route to the Queensland Herbarium.)

“With this grant, we can build this massive online database of specimens that reach back through time and across space,” Tepe said.

Researchers can track species that are indicators of habitat degradation or others that suggest a healthy ecosystem. They can track the spread of invasive species or understand the forces driving other species like running buffalo clover to the brink of extinction.

“They could be an early warning sign of incipient change,” Tepe said.

The searchable online database includes images of the specimen, where practicable. Since most of the dehydrated mosses look alike in their envelopes, they photograph the historic label instead. Some of these date back to the 1840s.

And UC’s herbarium is home to an unlikely treasure trove of plants. Lloyd collected hundreds of species during winter trips to Samoa in 1904 and 1905, giving UC one of the oldest collections of plants from the archipelago.

“Before these consortia, who would have thought to look to us for Samoan plants?” Tepe said.

Tepe and other botanists, both students and faculty, collect more specimens each year. UC’s herbarium logged 1,218 additional specimens in 2017 and 5,2111 in 2016.

UC researcher and Miami University graduate Amy Harmon is working to expand UC’s database. Her specialty is mushrooms and other fungi. One called the “death cap” is so toxic it can kill a careless chef. Winter white truffles are so rare and delicious that they command outrageous prices.

“Some produce really helpful compounds. And some produce the yeast or penicillin we need,” she said. “I was just reading about a fungus that grows inside a tree that people have been using for a chemotherapy drug to treat cancer.”

Featured image at top: A UC biology student studies goldenrod at UC's Center for Field Studies. Photo/Ravenna Rutledge/UC Creative Services