The University of North Georgia Herbarium: Contributions of Southeastern Flora

An herbarium is a collection of mounted dried plants that are preserved and stored for many scientific purposes, especially for teaching and research.  At the University of North Georgia, we are focused on collections of regional and Southeastern native plants. Most plants that have been collected have been found in Georgia, but there are a handful from other states. Over 2,000 specimens are in our database, with many more currently being processed. The plants have been collected over the years by students and educators, dating back to 1999.

Specimens are important for research, conservation purposes, and for teaching. These collections can be used for documentation of biodiversity, biogeographic trends, recording locations of rare and protected species, and conservation biology. DNA can also be extracted from dry specimens, which can be used for population genetics, functional genomics, phylogenetics research, taxonomic revisions, and more. Herbaria and other natural history collections have never been more important to scientific knowledge, and the development of a herbarium at the University of North Georgia will help document the flora of this under-studied and poorly known region of Southeastern North America.