JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Anyone who works to understand the world of plants and the Earth's biodiversity typically will count on herbaria. These are collections of pressed and dried plant specimens that are housed at institutions around the world. The information they provide has become even more important as scientists work to understand and adapt to climate change. In some places, though, the future of these plant libraries is at stake. Harvest Public Media's Kate Grumke reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF GEAR CLANKING)
KATE GRUMKE, BYLINE: Matthew Austin twists a huge gear at the end of a large library stack-style shelf in a room filled with many more just like it. This is the herbarium at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. It's one of the largest collections of dried plant specimens in the world. The tall compactors slide open, revealing shelves filled with hundreds of folders.
MATTHEW AUSTIN: OK, Sanguinaria canadensis.
(SOUNDBITE OF PAGES FLIPPING)
GRUMKE: Austin reads off labels as he flips through pages with dried plants stuck to them.
AUSTIN: One with no flowers from March 24, 1935.
GRUMKE: Austin is a curator of biodiversity data and says in these pages, he found a pattern. It shows that climate change is affecting when local flowers bloom, sometimes throwing them off by weeks.
AUSTIN: So we know that flowering is highly controlled by temperature. The herbarium struck me as a really powerful tool to addressing this.
GRUMKE: The changes Austin found are something that other scientists are finding in herbaria elsewhere. They say these plant libraries are essential for understanding dangerous problems the world faces, like biodiversity loss and climate change. But many people who work at these libraries are worried about their future. Early last year, an announcement sent waves through the botany community - Duke University planned to get rid of its herbarium. Kathleen Pryer is its director.
KATHLEEN PRYER: I was called into the dean's office and told the herbarium was dead.
GRUMKE: There was a real uproar from the scientific community. Scientists condemned the decision in journals. More than 20,000 signatures on a change.org petition asked the university to reconsider.
PRYER: The outrage was very remarkable, and I think it stunned the Duke administration into silence.
GRUMKE: A year later, the university's herbarium still exists, but Pryer says it's still not clear what's going to happen. Duke didn't respond to multiple requests for comment. In the herbaria community, the news was a warning shot, says Barbara Thiers, director emerita of the New York Botanical Garden herbarium. Thiers tracks the number of herbaria around the world. She's counted more than 3,800, from tiny to large. But she says it's shocking that an herbarium as big as Duke may be on the chopping block.
BARBARA THIERS: When we are all trying so hard to document biodiversity and to understand it as we face these - the environmental challenges that we're facing.
GRUMKE: Thiers says each collection is vulnerable to the whims of its institution. At a time when federal funding for education and research is in question, she's worried.
THIERS: I feel like we're always just on the brink of disaster of major herbaria closing, but fortunately, it hasn't happened yet.
GRUMKE: Smaller herbaria have closed, and the orphaned plants had to be taken in by other collections. Lynn Clark is the director of Iowa State University's herbarium, which has grown in recent decades, in part because it took in the collections of smaller herbaria.
LYNN CLARK: It's important to make sure that all of these are taken care of. And - not that we like to see herbaria closing, but we can't just let them be mothballed, either.
GRUMKE: So at herbaria across the country, scientists are racing to digitize all of this information so they can learn more about ecosystems that might otherwise be lost. For NPR News, I'm Kate Grumke in St. Louis.
(SOUNDBITE OF JEAN CARNE, ADRIAN YOUNGE AND ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD SONG, "VISIONS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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