美国国家公共电台 NPR Centuries-Old Plant Collection Now Online — A Treasure Trove For Researchers

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

For centuries, scientists and amateur botanists 1 scoured 2 the country to document and preserve plant species. Their findings were prized like fine art. Now there's a new effort to digitize these collections, a treasure trove 3 for researchers. From member station WHYY in Philadelphia, Susan Phillips reports.

SUSAN PHILLIPS, BYLINE 4: On the fifth floor of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, in a cool, windowless room that smells a little pungent 5...

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PHILLIPS: ...Tall, metal cabinets store some of the most famous dead plants in the world.

RICK MCCOURT: This is called Grindelia squarrosa. And it was collected...

PHILLIPS: Rick McCourt is the botany curator here. And he reads the notes scribbled 6 around this dried and pressed pretty, yellow flower.

MCCOURT: And so it says prairies in the camp near the old Maha (ph) village - that's a Native American village - September 17, 1804.

PHILLIPS: Members of the Lewis and Clark expedition collected this medicinal flower. This herbarium, like a library for plants, is the oldest in North America. McCourt says it has more than a million dried plants collected by explorers, botanists and citizen scientists over the past 400 years.

MCCOURT: I almost think of it like any collector - like, you know, baseball trading cards. I mean, it was a competitive game to see if you could describe a lot of new species. And there were different levels of vanity associated with it.

PHILLIPS: These collections are difficult to access. But now there's a massive effort to photograph and make available online hundreds of thousands of plants housed in about a dozen institutions on the East Coast. It's called the Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis 7 project. McCourt says hundreds of years of plant data could answer questions about conservation, climate change and development.

MCCOURT: Like, how has the environment changed? What plants occur where? Do they occur someplace differently now than they used to? Are they banished 8 or gone from an area?

PHILLIPS: He says it might even raise the possibility of using plant DNA 9 to bring back extinct species.

MCCOURT: That's more like a "Jurassic Park" dream. But DNA is DNA. Who knows?

PHILLIPS: At Muhlenberg College, ecologist Rich Niesenbaum just finished adding its plant collection to the database. He's using it to track down a rare and possibly endangered plant called the flat-stemmed pond weed. But going by the centuries-old handwritten notes isn't easy.

RICH NIESENBAUM: It's a grass - an aquatic 10 grass growing in Cedar 11 Creek 12 south of Fairview Street.

PHILLIPS: The notes also mention a quarry 13. And there's only one in Allentown, so he's pretty confident he knows where to go.

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PHILLIPS: We head to Cedar Creek, where thickets 14 of reeds and cattails line the banks.

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PHILLIPS: There's a lot of poison ivy 15 here.

NEISENBAUM: I don't see any grass down in here.

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PHILLIPS: Crowding out everything else are invasive species like Japanese knotweed and stiltgrass, one reason why some of these native plants are endangered. But then he does spot the rare grass.

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NEISENBAUM: All right. I'm getting in the creek.

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NEISENBAUM: Oh, that's refreshing 16. Yeah, I think we'll take this back to the lab and take a look at it.

PHILLIPS: But does it surprise you to even find it here?

NEISENBAUM: Yeah. I'm surprised. I mean, that's exciting because, you know, as a plant hunter - right? - we spend a lot more time hunting and looking than actually finding.

PHILLIPS: Niesenbaum says he'll grow it in the lab to make sure it's a match. If so, it will be added to the database, minus the exact location. Because the plant's at risk of being extinct, that will be kept a secret. For NPR News, I'm Susan Phillips in Philadelphia.