Northern Ontario Plant Database

Who collects the plants in an herbarium?

Most of the herbarium specimens in our partner herbaria were collected by local botanists, researchers, and university students, but some specimens were received as an exchange from other parts of Canada or foreign countries. Due to time and monetary constraints, specimens from counties outside of North America have not been included in this database.

At the Great Lakes Forestry Centre, many of the specimens were collected by former Canadian Forest Service research scientists, such as Dr. F.E. Fye, Dr. John K. Jeglum, and Dr. Richard Sims. In addition to voucher specimens collected from their research sites, specimens collected during their Ph.D. research are also included in the herbarium. The Claude E. Garton Herbarium at Lakehead University has a large number of plants collected by Claude Garton and other researchers involved in floristic studies of the Thunder Bay, Lake Superior, and Clay Belt regions, including S.T.B. Losee, W.K.W. Baldwin, Bernard Boivin, and Shan Walshe, who also collected many of the specimens in the Quetico Herbarium. Student collections comprise most of the specimens in local university herbaria, except for Sault College, whose nearly 1450 specimen vascular plant collection was contracted out to S.G. Newmaster. This recent herbarium collection, which is used primarily in plant identification courses at Sault College, contains approximately 6-20+ replicates of 119 vascular plant species, all collected during the 2000 field season.

Information about botanists who have contributed substantial numbers of specimens to the herbaria in partnership with the Northern Ontario Plant Database Project can be accessed through the Collector Biographies link.