CSBR: Natural History: Relocation and critical upgrades to storage, curation, and digital access to the Margaret H. Fulford Herbarium at the University of Cincinnati

This project will provide critical upgrades to the Margaret H. Fulford Herbarium at the University of Cincinnati, including a move of the collection into a new facility. The herbarium of approximately 118,500 specimens collected in the 1820s through 2021 represents a regional vascular flora and a world-class collection of mosses and liverworts.

The herbarium also houses Dr. Margaret Fulford’s personal library, which includes many rare volumes, unpublished field and laboratory notebooks, and over 100 binders of original, mostly unpublished original technical illustrations. Recently, the University of Cincinnati renovated a new space for the herbarium in an adjacent building that houses the Department of Biological Sciences.

The new herbarium space will dramatically improve the security and longevity of the collection, and provides additional capacity for research, education, specimen imaging and databasing, and continuing public engagement. Two ongoing education programs will be enhanced and will include a collaborative specimen imaging project involving developmentally disabled students, and a local 5th-8th grade “STEM Girls” program.

This three-year project will support moving the herbarium into the new and vastly upgraded space by providing a compactor system and modern herbarium cabinets. The current storage conditions are very poor, resulting from frequent water leaks and several catastrophic flooding events, which have caused severe damage to most of the cabinets. These circumstances have left the collection vulnerable to further damage from water, humidity, insect infestations, etc.

The herbarium also has specimens that are currently stored on open shelves and are effectively unavailable to researchers or the general public. In addition, ca. 12,000 bryophyte specimens will be curated, imaged, and databased. These specimens, collected by notable bryophyte specialists Margaret Fulford and Jerry Snider, will be made accessible to researchers and the general public through the herbarium databases and iDigBio.org.

Finally, Fulford’s ca. 3,500 technically detailed illustrations will be scanned and made accessible. Thus, this project will facilitate the herbarium’s ongoing commitment to open the museum doors to the world by creating a modern, user-friendly facility and sharing its invaluable collection of specimens and illustrations through online, publicly accessible portals.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.