1/15/2024 0 Comments Phoenix botanical garden careersI had no formal training but I soon became intrigued with herbarium specimens, which meshed well with my evolving interest and love for collecting. Pinkava, world-known cactus expert and former director of ASU Herbarium. Harry Lehr, former curator of DES, and Donald J. Wendy: I had the pleasure in the 1970s and early 1980s to work with Howard Scott Gentry, world-known agave expert, J. However, we need to do far more to prepare future herbarium curators. Arizona State University (ASU) offers a master’s degree program in plant biology and conservation in collaboration with the Desert Botanical Garden research staff (which includes the herbarium) that provides students with advanced training in plant ecology, evolution, and floristics as well as in theory and practice of conservation biology. Our botany boot camp program and resulting floras, called Plant Atlas of Arizona (PAPAZ), has changed lives, including an individual who quit her job, obtained a master’s degree, and is the herbarium curator/collections manager of a major herbarium in the state. Floras, also inextricably tied with herbaria, are not as respected as they should be, yet provide the foundation for our knowledge of what occurs in any given area, as well as the discovery of new taxa. To help fill this void, we offer botany "boot camps"-a rigorous two-day workshop with fieldwork we started in 2008 to anyone who wants to know more about Arizona botany, including basic botany, what botanists/curators do, that provides opportunities to do important, but too often denigrated, floristic work. I have seen a solid botany program that stood on its own at a major university change to a program where other moneymaking disciplines completely overshadow botany. We must also provide young (and older) prospective botanists/herbarium curators/ managers. We must constantly show that keeping an herbarium program active far outweighs any perceived monetary gain-it does not need to be an either/or situation. Herbaria values are inextricably linked to understanding the concepts of biodiversity and conservation – both biological and cultural that are also inextricably linked. It is the role and responsibility of the curator/ manager/director to define the role of herbaria in general, and their herbarium specifically, to a diverse group of stakeholders, including staff, addressing how herbaria are used and their benefits. Too often significant, often smaller, more regionalized (and significantly important) herbaria are divested into the larger herbaria, or unmaintained with no or inadequate staff. Wendy: One of the challenges I see is to make people understand the relevance of herbaria.
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