Feature written by Rebecca Dolan on the BUT—The Friesner Herbarium of Butler University in the Vasculum

Dolan, Rebecca W.

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Digital Commons @ Butler University

Butler University Digital Commons @ Butler University Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS College of Liberal Arts & Sciences 2017 Featured Herbarium: BUT—The Friesner Herbarium of Butler University Rebecca W. Dolan Butler University, rdolan@butler.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers  Part of the Biology Commons, and the Botany Commons Recommended Citation Dolan, Rebecca W., "Featured Herbarium: BUT—The Friesner Herbarium of Butler University" The Vasculum / (2017): 8-11. Available at https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/994 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Butler University. For more information, please contact digitalscholarship@butler.edu.  8 Featured Herbarium: BUT -   The Friesner Herbarium of Butler University  Butler University is a private, primarily undergraduate liberal arts school located in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.  Butler was founded in 1855 by attorney and abolitionist Ovid Butler.  From the beginning, women and minority members were admitted on an equal basis with white males. Current enrollment is 4,800 students.  Butler’s 300-acre park-like campus is located five miles from downtown Indianapolis.    Butler’s Friesner Herbarium (BUT) is housed in the Bi-ology Department, a unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.  Staff are a full-time salaried director (Re-becca Dolan, for 30 years) and a part-time technology assistant (Marcia Moore, for 21 years).  Located in room 72 of Gallahue Science Hall, BUT occupies 900 ft2 on the garden level (=basement). We have three rooms.  One for staff, student, and visitor work space, one for cabinets, and a small adjacent room for miscellaneous collections, mounting, and imaging.  Wireless and hard-wired internet connections are available, along with botany reference books with a focus on Indiana flora and a dissecting microscope on a boom arm to examine mounted specimens.  Accession books were lost decades ago before current staff started. We estimate BUT is comprised of over 100,000 primarily vascular plant specimens, about 40% collected in Indiana.  BUT is largely a legacy collection.  Donations of new specimens are accepted, primarily of new state records, including invasive non-native species, and vouchers of site-based plant inventories. We have accepted small orphan collections, including several thousand sheets from St. Meinrad College’s Henrietta Herbarium, focused primarily on plants of southern Indi-ana.  Some Indiana collections, including specimens col-lected in the 1880s by John Coulter, were repatriated at BUT after the herbaria of Wabash College (WAB) and DePauw University (DPU) were given to the New York Botanical Garden (NY) in the early 1990s.    Establishment and History - The Botany Department of Butler University started in 1919 with the hiring of Ray C. Friesner (1984-1952; B.A. Ohio Wesleyan University, Ph.D. University of Michigan) as Chair (Fig. 1). He was an avid collector and exchanger, recognized as an excel-lent teacher and mentor.  Students enthusiastically signed up for his classes, which had Saturday morning labs and field trips (Fig. 2).  His collection books detail over 50,000 specimens.  He was a contemporary of Charles Deam, author of the last comprehensive manual of the flora of Indiana, published in 1940.  Deam determined identifications for many specimens at BUT.  Friesner died of a heart attack in his late 50s after taking on the job of Dean of the College (message = don’t give up field work).  The former “Butler Herbarium” was rededi-cated and renamed to honor Friesner in 1987.   Figure 1 - Ray Friesner in the field with his vasculum.  Undated.   Figure 2 - Thank you letter to Friesner after field trip to the Indiana dunes on Lake Michigan.  9 From its earliest days, Butler botany was focused on community ecology, “phytosociology.” Researchers were mostly interested in species distributions and asso-ciations, focusing on flora of the state (Fig. 3).  Butler had a very active master’s degree program in the 1930s-1950s.  Prominent faculty and students included Stanley Cain, John Potzger, Willard Nelson Clute, Rex Daubenmire, and Dwight Billings.  Details of early But-ler botany have been published in Brittonia (Dolan 1991), including a list of botanists with whom Friesner exchanged specimens.  John Pelton and Willard Yates served as BUT curators in the 1960s through mid-1980s.    Figure 3 - Butler University Plant Ecology class field trip to local natural area Bacon’s Swamp in 1928.  Pho-to provided by Rex Daubenmire, second on the right.  Butler University Botanical Studies journal - http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/botanical/.  The Butler University Botanical Studies (BUBS) journal was published by the Botany Department from 1929 to 1964.  The scientific journal featured original papers primarily on plant ecology, taxonomy, and microbiology. The papers contain valuable historical studies, especially floristic surveys that document Indiana’s vegetation in past decades.  Authors were Butler faculty, current and former master’s degree students and undergraduates, and other Indiana botanists.  The journal was started by Cain, and edited through most of its years of production by Friesner.  It was distributed to learned societies and li-braries through exchange.  Requests for use of materials, especially figures and tables for use in ecology text books, from BUBS continue to be granted.  BUBS is available digitally at the above address and through JSTOR and the Biodiversity Heritage Library at Harvard. A complete index to the journal was compiled by Dolan (1992).  Hardcopy original reprints of most articles are available by request.  Recent activities Digitization and imaging - Starting about 20 years ago, herbarium assistant Marcia Moore created a Paradox da-tabase to hold label metadata and we began capturing in-formation from our Indiana specimens. Ten years of hourly wage student data entry into controlled vocabu-lary fields later, we had completed the effort.  We mobi-lized our data to the web, with the help of the Dean of Libraries and a metadata librarian at Butler University Libraries, and the Friesner Herbarium Digital Collection was created (FHDC; palni.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ landingpage/collection/herbarium4.  We received fund-ing totaling $56,282 from 2009-12 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered by the Indiana State Library.  The collection can also be accessed through the Indiana Memory site of the Indiana State Library and the Digital Public Library of America. We began by imaging specimens from the largest plant families in Indiana, making them and the associated metadata of all our Indiana holdings searchable on the web as a special collection of the Butler University Li-braries, using the internet content management system, CONTENTdm, as the management software.  Imaging was outsourced to the IUPUI University Libraries be-cause they had equipment and staff to handle to work. BUT has recently been part of two NSF-funded TCNS.  We contributed ca. 5,000 specimens to the macroalgae TCN.  We recently completed imaging ca 14,000 speci-mens for the aquatic invasives TCN using an imaging station loaned from the University of Wisconsin (Fig. 4).  Success using that equipment in-house gave us confi-dence to continue imaging with student assistants on our own.  We purchased a customized imaging station based on a model developed by Deam Herbarium staff at Indi-ana University, sharing the cost with our library.  They have 3-dimensional materials in their special collections that they wish to image.  Using monies from our gift and endowment funds, we plan on completing our imaging of Indiana sheets by June of 2018 (Fig. 5).    Figure 4 - Student Rachel Terheide working at imaging station loaned by University of Wisconsin for Invasives TCN.   10  Figure 5 - Student Jacqueline Juett working at the new image station.  Herbarium Website - www.butler.edu/herbarium.  The website for BUT is managed by Marcia Moore.  Over the years, she worked to make the site an outreach tool for the University and an avenue for informal botany educa-tion.  Photos of spring wildflowers, prairie plants, and trees of the Butler campus are featured, along with iden-tification tips.  In 2016, the site had over 4,400 unique visitors.  Indiana Plant Atlas (IPA) - http://www.indiana.plantatlas.usf.edu/.  In 2012, Dolan received an Innovation Fund grant of $20,000 from Butler University to create an online atlas of the Indiana flora.  This project was also supported fi-nancially by the Indiana Academy of Science and the In-diana Native Plant and Wildflower Society.  Using a cus-tomized template designed by the staff of the University of South Florida already in use in Florida, New York and Alabama, we launched the Indiana Plant Atlas in 2016.  The Atlas uses our plant images and metadata, displaying county-level distribution maps.  It has links to specimen images from the FHDC and to in situ photos of live plants taken by Indiana photographers, most of whom are amateur botanists, along with additional information about each species.  We plan to add Indiana records from other in-state herbaria as they become available digitally and hope to include records of Indiana plants in out-of-state herbaria from Symbiota in the future, to make the atlas as comprehensive as possible.  Endowment and Gift Funds - BUT has a small operat-ing budget provided by the college.  The Friesner Her-barium also has an endowment that generates about $12,000 a year for general support of operations.  The fund began with a $100,000 estate gift from Ray Friesner’s widow Gladys in the 1990s.  Two alumnae subsequently made large estate gifts.  All three lived to be 100 years old or more, reflecting the many benefits of a lifetime enjoyment of botany.  The endowment funds student assistants, technology improvements, and addi-tional salary for staff.  We also have a gift fund that re-ceives smaller donations that supports special purchases like volumes of FNA.   Public Relations and Outreach - Every year we pro-duce an annual report summarizing all activity in the Herbarium.  This includes loans and inquiries, calls from the public, formal and informal presentations, publica-tions citing BUT, student worker activities, materials used in Butler classes, etc.  This has proved to be a great institutional memory resource.  Copies are shared with administrators, donors, and members of the University Advancement Department staff.  We have hosted an Annual Open House and Special Lec-ture for 29 years.  Speakers usually are local and talk on local botanical natural history, but have included Butler graduates speaking on their research.  The lecture is at-tended by students and staff.  For the lunch we invite members of the community, including local agency per-sonnel, not-for-profit staff, academics, alumni, emeriti, and members of the Indiana Native Plant and Wildflower Society.  Herbarium tours follow each year’s talk.  We also organize an annual garlic mustard pull in the Butler Woods, a 5-acre older-growth beech-maple woods remnant on the campus.  Students from botany classes, both majors and non-majors work for a few hours on a Sunday around Earth Day on hands-on environmental stewardship and then share a lunch.  For many years BUT also had monthly informal interpretive natural walks open to faculty, students, staff and guests.  Dolan led the walks.  We visited all parts of the campus to see what was going on, botanically speaking, throughout the year.  We maintain a campus tree walk, with accompany-ing brochure and web info.  Dolan teaches an upper-division elective Local Flora class every-other spring.  The Director of BUT also manages the Butler Prairie, a 3-acre planted prairie demonstration on campus that is used as an outdoor lab.  We produce and update a bro-chure on the prairie, thought to be the oldest prairie re-construction in Indiana. Herbarium staff have led suc-cessful efforts to have the campus recognized as a Tree Campus USA and to be certified by the Indiana Wildlife Federation as a Sustainably Landscaped campus.  Rebec-ca sits on the campus Greenspace Committee.  In recent years, the herbarium has partnered with But-ler’s Center for Urban Ecology on plant-related projects, including inventories of city parks, an urban BioBliz in 2016, and quantitative vegetation analysis of ecological restoration projects.  These projects have resulted in twelve recent peer-reviewed journal articles, including one comparing the historical flora of Indianapolis with its current flora based on herbarium specimens and re-cent inventories (Dolan, Moore and Stephens 2011).  See   https://works.bepress.com/rebecca_dolan/ for other pa-pers.   11 Additional Current Projects - We have been working for many years with Kay Yatskievych on an Indiana Vascular Plant Catalogue, a comprehensive listing of all plants documented to occur in the state via an herbarium specimen.  The Catalogue will include synonomy and di-rect reference to names used in Deam’s flora and other historical manuals.  Publication by Indiana University Press is anticipated in 2018.  Successful Grads - Former students who worked in or were associated with the herbarium, who pursued botani-cal careers include Matt Halfhill (Professor, St. Ambrose University), Troy Weldy (Director of Ecological Man-agement, The Nature Conservancy in New York), Matt Julius (Professor, St. Cloud State University), Raelene Crandall (Assistant Professor, School of Forest Re-sources and Conservation, University of Florida), and Jess Stephens (Post-doc in Tia-Lynn Ashman’s lab at the University of Pittsburgh).  Apologies to anyone not men-tioned here who should be - contact me!  Many other former BUT student assistants are now pharmacists, doc-tors, stay-at-home parents, native seed nursery owners, environmental consultants, etc.       References  Dolan, R.W. 1991. The Friesner Herbarium (BUT) of            Butler University. Brittonia 43:54-56.  Dolan, R.W. 1992. A complete index to the Butler Uni-versity Botanical Studies, a journal of original re-search published by Butler University 1929-1964. Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science 101:1-18.  Dolan, R.W., M. E. Moore and J. Stephens.  2011. Doc-umenting effects of urbanization on flora using her-barium records.  Journal of Ecology 99:1055-1063.  - Rebecca W. Dolan, Butler University,  rdolan@butler.edu    Fifth Georgia Herbarium Alliance Meeting, February 2017  The fifth Georgia Herbarium Alliance meeting was held on 25 February 2017 in the Bailey Science Center at Valdosta State University and was hosted by VSC Cura-tor Richard Carter (Fig. 1).  The meeting was attended by 18 participants (all from Georgia), representing 10 insti-tutions (nine herbaria) plus iDigBio (Fig. 2).  Participant costs for this meeting were provided by an NSF Work-shop Grant awarded to Wendy B. Zomlefer (DBI-1521928; GA Herbarium, University of Georgia).  We were welcomed by Assistant Dean Mark Smith and Biology Department Head Robert Gannon, who both lauded Richard’s care and promotion of the VSC herbar-ium.  Assisted by undergraduate herbarium workers, Ashlee and Emerald Robinson (Fig. 3) and Savannah Glenn, Richard then gave us the grand tour of the ex-panded VSC facility - including a new compactor sys-tem!  We were all especially impressed with the glass-doored cabinets for archiving and displaying an exten-sive teaching collection originally assembled by Robert Kral, Professor Emeritus, Vanderbilt University.  The re-cent VSC herbarium improvements were made possible through NSF-CSBR support (Carter 2015); for additional details about VSC see Carter (2016).    Figure 1 - Richard Carter showing new bottles and la-bels for elements of the VSC teaching collection.  Photo credit: W. Zomlefer.   The informal presentations began with Wendy Zomlefer (GA) providing a review of the Alliance (Georgia Her-barium Alliance: 2017 and Beyond!), followed by Gil Nelson (iDigBio) describing the next phase of the iDig-Bio initiative that focuses on research questions and methodologies for analyzing natural history collections data gathered from so many institutions.  Each of the re-maining herbarium representatives then provided updates on their collections.  Other exciting developments with Georgia herbaria include: REH (Reinhardt University), a new herbarium in Georgia with 500 specimens curated by Aliya Donnell Davenport; a new curator for AASU, Michele Guidone, who replaces Melanie Link-Peréz (now at OSC); facility renovations and new cabinets for WGC (David Morgan); GEO and GSW imaging progress and associated outreach activities (Thara Samarkoon and Stephanie Harvey, respectively); georeferencing speci-mens at GA (Ella Vardeman); a new Webpage (https://sites.google.com/a/georgiasouthern.edu/schenk/herbarium) and digitization updates for GAS (John Schenk and Alan Harvey, respectively); and DNA bar-coding projects - national and international - by COLG personnel (Kevin Burgess and Lauren Whitehurst).  New Alliance member Gretchen Ionta, Coordinator of the View publication stats

Featured Herbarium: BUT—The Friesner Herbarium of Butler University

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Featured Herbarium: BUT—The Friesner Herbarium of Butler University

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