UNB herbarium plants its collection into online database to aid research

The province's largest collection of vascular plants is movingto the World Wide Web.

Robyn Shortt of the Connell Memorial Herbarium said 58,000 specimens are beingentered into a digital database to aid scientific research.

The database will aim to help not only botanists, but any citizen who comes across an unfamiliar plant, she said.

"If they have a plant in their backyard, or are doing a fish survey and wanted to know the habitat around it, andfound a plant they couldn't identify, they can come in and compare," she said.

Oldest institutional collection

Established in 1838, the Connell Memorial Herbariumis the oldest institutional collection still runningin the country.

The second largest collection in Atlantic Canada, it now houses over 64,000 specimens. It even has analgaecollection of more than 27,000 specimensand a small mycological (fungi) collection.

Over the last few years, Shortt said ateam of volunteers at the University of New Brunswick's "plant library" workedto get as many of the specimens' data online with high-resolution scans of the herbarium's collection.

The project was funded by theNew Brunswick Wildlife Trust Fund andthe university's biology department, and proceeds from the sale of the "Flora of New Brunswick,"a manual on identifying plants in the province.

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Conservation biologist Allison Patricksaidhaving the herbarium so close is great for her work with the Nature Conservancy of Canada in Fredericton.

She said the conservancy recently found a rare plant, a "little curly grass fern," in an area nearChance Harbour, about 25 kilometresnortheast of Grand Bay-Westfield.

The plant isnow one of the newest additions to the herbarium's collection.

"Often we find plants that we're not familiar with and then we can come here and meet with experts and see plantsamples and kind of solve the mystery," she said.

Plant puzzles

Shorttsaid the herbarium's collection includesplants from the early tomid-1800suntil now. Many of the older specimens werecollected by some of the firstbotanists inNew Brunswick, she said.

"It's really neat to look at their handwriting and trying to decipher the locations," she said."What might be called one thing in northern N.B.is called something else in southern N.B.,

"So you end up doing these puzzles and trying to figure out what the plants are and how the names have changed over time and over geography."