Technology extends herbarium’s outreach

Dr. Steve Timme is happy to show visitors his 60,000 plants and isn’t at all bothered by the fact that all of them are dead. Timme, a member of the faculty in the Pittsburg State University Department of Biology, is director and curator of the Sperry Herbarium at Pittsburg State. The herbarium is a catalog of the surprisingly diverse plants that inhabit the Four-State region and beyond.

The Sperry Herbarium was established in 1946 by Dr. Theodore M. Sperry, a member of the PSU faculty. Sperry, a founding member of the Nature Conservancy, is called the “father of ecological restoration” by the Society for Ecological Restoration.

Over the past six decades, the herbarium that now bear’s Dr. Sperry’s name, has grown to become the third largest in Kansas, according to Timme.

“We have more than 60,000 specimens that are mostly the flowering plants,” Timme said. “And we have about 5,000 specimens of liverworts and mosses.”

Timme said the Sperry Herbarium is a “regional herbarium” with a good collection of plants found in Kansas, southwest Missouri, northwest Arkansas and northeast Oklahoma.

“We also have a good collection from the Amazon,” Timme said.

Timme said that although researchers may come to examine specimens in the herbarium, the most common research is done through an exchange with other collections.

“We have exchanges with Louisiana, Missouri, Peru, Japan and Germany,” Timme said.

Technology is helping to extend the Sperry Herbarium’s outreach, Timme said, making it possible for researchers to get information more quickly and more easily than ever before. In the past year, Timme has worked with fellow Biology Department faculty member Dr. Joe Arruda to develop a robust Web site for the herbarium. An important feature of the Web site is a growing online illustrated guide to plants.

“Online was something I really wanted to do,” Timme said. “Dr. Arruda agreed to be the Webmaster. The design is all his. My job was to provide him with the photos, names and habitat.”

Timme said they began with just the flowering plants.

“Then I thought, ‘Why not trees?’ and next came grasses,” Timme said.

Visitors to the Web site can search for flowers by color, common name, family name or scientific name. They can do the same for woody plants by common or scientific name or leaf and type and for grasses by common or family name.

For a group of 150 or 175 persons on his e-mail list, Timme also poses a weekly online wildflower challenge. For this group, Timme posts a photo of one or two flowers, which he challenges them to identify.

“The Internet has changed so much,” Timme observed.

Visit the Sperry Herbarium online at www.pittstate.edu/herbarium/
Contact Dr. Steve Timme: slt@pittstate.edu

---Pitt State--