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Director's Update
 Welcome to the new University of Michigan Herbarium website! Our site has been redesigned by our Administrative Specialist Patrick Ryan, who is helping greatly to organize and modernize the Herbarium.
We are eagerly awaiting the arrival in January of our new fungal curator, Timothy James, who is completing a postdoctoral fellowship at McMaster University in Canada. Tim’s arrival should provide the opportunity to revitalize our program in mycology at the university.
On other fronts, Curator Tony Reznicek is nearing completion of the Michigan Flora Handbook, which is an abridged and updated one-volume version of Michigan Flora. It is due to be published by University of Michigan Press. In conjunction with this update, we plan to launch a complementary Michigan Flora website, which will contain much of the information in the Handbook, as well as photographs and additional information available on species that are native or naturalized in Michigan.
Assistant Curator Christopher Dick is opening new doors for herbarium research by beginning to work on an integrated approach to identifying plant diversity in tropical forest plots. Besides the collection of traditional herbarium vouchers, he will collect material for molecular analysis as well and begin with an approach known as DNA barcoding. This would be an independent method of assessing the diversity of species-rich forests, particularly in the tropics, where up to 50% of the species may be difficult to identify by traditional means. His work is also targeted at evaluating if species considered to be widespread really represent single species, or alternatively, there may be species complexes that have so far gone undetected.
William and Christiane Anderson are wrapping up a National Science Foundation funded study of the genera of the tropical family Malpighiaceae. Tony Reznicek continues his study of the sedge genus Carex, and Richard Rabeler is more active now as an editor with the Flora North America project. I am coordinating an international project funded by the Planetary Biodiversity Inventory program of the National Science Foundation on the taxonomy and phylogeny of the large spurge genus Euphorbia, which includes over 2,300 species worldwide. The project combines molecular studies, revisionary work, and field work (so far to places as diverse as South Africa, Oman, Jamaica, Morocco, and Thailand), aiming to provide a virtual checklist or monograph of the genus within five years.
Finally, we are half way through obtaining high-resolution scans of our nearly 20,000 “type” specimens, which are of special value because they are tied to the original publications of new species. The project is being expertly managed by Research Specialist Heather Huggins, and it is funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation as part of a worldwide effort to provide digital access to type specimens from major herbaria.
In the coming years, we therefore hope to greatly increase accessibility to our collections and research online and to provide much more useful outreach tools to the public, particularly in regards to the Michigan and Great Lakes flora.
We would really appreciate your support and feedback as we engage in this new phase of activity at the U of M Herbarium.
Thank you and best wishes,
Paul E. Berry, Director |
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Species Focus:
Euphorbia punicea
A tree spurge endemic to the Cockpit country of western Jamaica, on the summit of Dolphin Head, Dec. 2007.
Photo: Paul E. Berry |
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