A team of WNMU faculty, community members and a graduate student are engaged in a multi-year project to inventory all of the plants growing in Silver City.
For most of the plants the team identifies, a specimen is collected and preserved to become part of the Dale A. Zimmerman Herbarium, housed in Harlan Hall. When collecting a specimen is not feasible, for example, with large cacti, or when a plant is endangered or rare, team members instead document the plant with photography.
Founded in 1957 and later named after its founder, a former WNMU faculty member, the Dale A. Zimmerman Herbarium, consists of a large workroom and library for the study and mounting of specimens, as well as a spacious attached room housing pressed specimens. There are currently over 34,000 specimens in the collection, and they are available for faculty, students and visitors to use for research and education.
According to Professor of Biology William Norris, one of the goals of the Silver City Flora project is to heighten awareness of local plants within the community. “The project has been going on for two years, and we have found over 500 different plant species,” he said. “I would not have thought we would find so many in that time. It is kind of astounding.”
Another goal of the project is to establish a baseline for further study, said project member and herbarium volunteer Angela Flanders. “This study establishes a baseline so that we can know something about how the environment is changing and whether we are losing diversity,” she explained. “Native plants are used in just about anything you can think of. They are used in cosmetics, they are used in medicine, so if we don’t have diversity, then we lose the ability to develop new medicines, new products.”
In addition, said group member and botanist Mark Widrlechner, the project will document not only the native plants found, but also those that are introduced or invasive.
Silver City has a long history of plant collection, indicated Norris. “There have been over 9,000 plant specimens collected in the Silver City region since 1851,” he said. Most of these specimens are in other herbaria around the country.
Because of this long history of specimen collection, the Silver City Flora project will allow researchers to compare current flora with that documented historically.
The idea of documenting all the plants in a city or town is not new, but it is highly unusual. “There have only been three or four other studies ever done in North America,” said Norris. “This is, to my knowledge, the first study of the flora of an urban area ever conducted in the western United States.”
The specimens themselves will be a useful addition to the herbarium’s collection, a collection that is central to the study of botany at WNMU. “At least three of the courses that we teach here for one of our most popular degree programs, Forest – Wildlife, depend on this herbarium,” said Norris. “If we don’t have these specimens here for students to refer to, we really can’t put on a high-quality course.”
Beyond this practical educational benefit, the Silver City Flora project has also benefitted the people involved.
“I think the greatest success of this project,” said Norris, “is the collaboration between people of wildly different backgrounds. The project has provided an opportunity for us to come together to do something worthwhile. It is going to go beyond just a scientific paper to get some heightened awareness of the plants we have here in Silver City.”
Adjunct Professor of Natural Sciences Russ Kleinman agreed. “It is kind of amazing how everyone here has their own expertise in something,” he said. “I think we are all learning from each other as we go.”