a day ago
Pitcher this: MUN herbarium home to thousands of N.L. botanicals
In a room full of tall metal cabinets, Julissa Roncal carefully flicks through stacks of manila folders. They're filled with pages of expertly pressed and dried plant specimens.
"See the little berries there? How do you dry a fleshy fruit and put it on a paper, completely dry?" she said, pulling out a page with a flat, dry branch with berries on it. They're perfectly preserved and dated 1966.
"It does take a lot of time, effort and art to put those fleshy fruits on a dried specimen that will last for decades."
Roncal is the curator of the Memorial University Agnes Marion Ayre Herbarium. The collection has about 100,000 specimens tucked in a small office on Mount Scio Road.
"They are basically cataloged or distributed following a particular order that represents the classification," she explained.
"Each specimen is labelled with the year it was collected, the person who collected it, and where it was found."
She said about 80 to 90 per cent of the specimens are from Newfoundland and Labrador, and the rest are from other parts of the world.
The collection, Roncal said, is not only important for research and history, but because it belongs to the people of the province.
"This is a specimen of the Newfoundland provincial flower," she said, pulling out a page with a dried pitcher plant adhered to it, titled Carbonear, 1945.
For decades, researchers and botanists have dried, pressed, and preserved specimens from three main categories: algae, mosses and vascular plants.
The collection is used to train biology students at MUN, who learn about databases, manipulating large data sets, and get experience in botany and biology in systematics, taxonomy and species distribution.
"We can extract DNA, for example, from these specimens for genomics research," Roncal said.
And depending on the research, the collection can also aid in climatological research.
"We can also track whether these species have changed their flowering times or their physiologies throughout time," she said.
"For example, we can detect whether a particular species is flowering sooner or later and correlate it with climate change, so that information can be observed or rescued from the information that is hosted or housed here."
Roncal said there are about sixteen thousand specimens digitized and accessible to the public.
Work at the herbarium started years before Roncal's tenure as curator. She describes the herbarium's namesake — Agnes Marion Ayre — as an influential figure.
"She was a suffragist, she fought for women's rights, for voting. So she's definitely an inspiration beyond botany for all of us," she said.
Ayre was an amateur botanist, and collected and preserved some of the specimens in the collection. Roncal said those contributions were the starting point.
"So it is the result of decades of botanical exploration and accumulation of these specimens," she said.
But Ayre didn't just catalogue plant species she found, she also painted them with watercolours while in the field. There are about two thousand of Ayre's paintings between the Centre for Newfoundland Studies and the herbarium.
It's a process that Roncal said added more detail than a typical press would.
"Painting allows you to devote time to deep, thorough observation of the plant that you have in front of you," Roncal said, looking at a painting from the 1920s.
"So that's why the combination of both is ideal to really get to know what species and identify with confidence what you're looking at," she said. "And putting a name to what you're looking at."
Roncal said her team is working on digitizing the rest of the collection to make it more accessible.
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