Plant collections: Possibilities of using herbaria, digital herbaria and plant databases in botany teaching at Eszterházy Károly University

Herbaria have been always used mostly by researchers dealing with systematic botany, taxonomy or flora of a certain area, providing insight into the variety of plant taxa and their distribution. Preserved specimens can also be used for molecular and phylogenetic research. In addition to their scientific mission, herbaria play an important role in botanical education. Besides traditional utilization of herbaria, there are a huge possibilities using virtual plant collections as well. The main target of this article is to highlight more important hungarian and worldwide-used plant online resources suitable for botany teaching to the students as well as wide public at Herbarium of Eszterházy Károly University, Eger (EGR).

From Specimen to System

The discipline of nineteenth-century botany was central both to the British imperial project and to the development of global theory. This article shows how the work of botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) advanced certain concepts of globalization by exploring scale relationships in two mid-century texts—a systematic botany, Flora Indica (1855), and a travel narrative, Himalayan Journals (1854)—and by analyzing in particular the methodologies that link individual botanical species and their global distribution. In doing so, he drew upon tropes of the sublime and related aesthetic techniques to raise crucial hermeneutical questions and to perform an important scale critique. His contributions underscore the need for new scale critiques in the humanities today and the recognition that such critiques have significant antecedents in the work of nineteenth-century writers and scientists.

Technological change and generic effects in a university Herbarium: A textography revisited

Herbaria principally host and study collections of dried vegetal specimens, and the curators and researchers employed there are mainly systematic botanists working on plant taxonomy. Twenty years ago, a textographic investigation of the University of Michigan Herbarium was conducted as part of a larger study. In this follow-up inquiry, we investigate what sort of changes have – or have not – occurred over the intervening period. Two of the five original Herbarium informants are still working there, and mainly through text-based interviews and discourse analysis we trace their subsequent careers and research outputs. We find that there has been considerable technological change since the 1990s, such as the growth of molecular studies, the digitization of specimens, and the use of the web, which has greatly impacted the processes of scholarly textual production. However, technological effects on the highly distinctive genres of systematic botany turn out to be more moderate. This genre set, comprising monograph, flora, treatment, and protologue, remains little known to those who study the more general discourses of the academic and research worlds.

Botanical illustration and photography: a southern hemisphere perspective

To examine claims that the role of botanical art in systematic botany is diminishing because of advances in photography, this review considers relevant literature and includes a quantitative analysis of trends in modern journals, monographs and floras. Our focus is on southern hemisphere systematic botany because, relative to the northern hemisphere, this is poorly represented in modern reviews of botanical art and photography. An analysis of all digitally available papers in Nuytsia, the Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Garden, Muelleria, Telopea, Austrobaileya and Systematic Botany established that, although photographic illustrations have increased since 2000, botanical illustrations have not always diminished. The cause of these trends is unknown, but it is likely to be due to several factors, including sourcing funding for production of botanical illustration, editorial preference for the use of illustrations or photographs, author preference for either illustrations or photographs, and moving to online publication, with no charges for colour reproduction. Moreover, the inclusion of botanical artists as co-authors in some scientific publications signals an ongoing and important role. Botanical illustration brings sharp focus and meticulous attention to detail regarding form and structure of plants. Photography is useful at the macro-scale for habitat and whole-plant traits, as well as at the micro-scale for anatomical textures and ultrastructure. These complementary approaches can be important components of taxonomic discovery, with the potential for a new role in modern trait analysis in molecular phylogenies.