Featured Herbarium: University of Alaska Museum of the North (ALA)

Stefanie Ickert-Bond

Alaska (U.S.A.) comprises approximately 1,723,344 square km and is by far the largest state in the Union at about one-fifth the size of the entire Lower 48 states (Fig. 1). If you combined the area of the states of Texas, California, and Montana, it would still be less than the size of Alaska. The state is vast, sparsely populated, and still so underexplored botanically that new species and new records are frequently found (Fig. 2; Andrus and Janssens 2003; Al- Shehbaz et al. 2009; Murray 2015; Fryday 2017; Lewis et al. 2017, Kyrkjeeide et al. 2018). The Herbarium (ALA) at the University of Alaska Museum of the North is the major regional collection and part of a network of collections with similar interests in the origin and evolution of the circumpolar flora. We are now the largest collection of Alaskan plants anywhere. Whereas there are significant holdings at some of the large North American herbaria, we are the only one mandated by virtue of our geography to study in the far north. This, of course, is true for the other collections at the UA Museum and indeed for much of the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) campus, where the Institute of Arctic Biology, the Institute of Marine Sciences, the Geophysical Institute, and the International Arctic Research Center are located (Fig. 1).

Hired in 2006 following an international search and a move to Alaska, my arctic adventure began (Fig. 3). During my tenure, my team and I have brought important infrastructure developments to ALA through funding mainly from the National Science Foundation (Fig. 4), the National Park Services Shared Beringia Program, the Institute of Museum and Library Studies (IMLS), and the Council on Library and Information Resources' Hidden Collections Program.

ALA is fully online with metadata and nearly 280,000 vascular and non-vascular specimens representing the largest collection of Alaskan plants anywhere. We installed high density storage and new cabinetry in 2009 and the collections are searchable with accompanied high resolution images of the specimens in the ARCTOS community database (https://arctos.database.museum/SpecimenSearch.cfm), as well as through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria (https://www.pnwherbaria.org/), the Consortium of North American Lichen Herbaria (https://lichenportal.org/cnalh/), and the Consortium of North American Bryophyte Herbaria (https://bryophyteportal.org/portal/). Completion of biogeoreferencing and Russian language label transcription is currently underway. The ALA collections are a leading example of online data access and delivery which helps to promote the inherent value of the Arctic flora and landscapes (Pellisier et al. 2016; Stewart et al. 2016).

The prominence and utility of the ALA Herbarium is further demonstrated by an h-index of 59 on our Google Scholar profile (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8UKsh1UAAAAJ&hl=en). The h-index (Hirsch 2005) for small collections was pioneered by Winker and Withrow (2013) and is widely seen as an effective means of measuring the impact of collections. An h-index of 59 (comparable with that of a Nobel laureate in Physics) emphasizes how much research infrastructure the ALA collections provide to researchers within Alaska and abroad. This use of the ALA collections will increase as new lines of investigation are developed.

In 2018, ALA was funded by the National Science Foundation for the project: Taxonomically intelligent data integration for a new Flora of Alaska. This project is innovative in using “taxon concepts” to weave together the data resources. Although the taxon concepts offer a level of information precision beyond that of scientific plant names alone, they have yet to be used in a multi-resource database such as ARCTOS. Data about the organisms that make up a biological taxon (e.g., a species) are linked in most databases by the taxon's scientific name and its synonyms. Given the ever-increasing amount of biological information in digital form, names have been called “the key to the big new biology” (Patterson et al. 2010). Using a single name to aggregate specimens when that name has differing circumscriptions will draw together a set of collections that do not represent a single coherent hypothesis of a taxon's boundaries. This is a major problem when mapping taxon distributions, especially when searching for range shifts over time (Franklin et al. 2017). This problem also results in decreased community trust in aggregated datasets (Hortal et al. 2015; Wiser 2016; Franz & Sterner 2018).

A solution to the problem of ambiguity caused by names' shifting circumscriptions has long been recognized: to use instead the taxon concept, by explicitly stating the circumstances of every name's usage (Berendsohn 1995), citing the publication of a particular circumscription (e.g., “Claytonia arctica Adams sensu (or sec.) Porsild (1974)”). Different usages can then be compared, or “aligned” (Franz et al. 2008), and explicitly presented by data aggregators to inform users and guide them when compiling records for downstream analysis (spatial distribution, etc.). Quoting the taxon concept rather than just the name in policy documents can also avoid some of the furor arising in user communities when the taxonomy of an endangered species changes (e.g., Garnett & Christidis 2017).

Some large taxon concept datasets do exist (e.g., Alan Weakley's comprehensive taxon concept records for the flora of the Southeast USA (Weakley 2015), Avibase (Lepage et al. 2014), VegBank (Peet et al. 2012) and the OIPI checklist (OIPI)), but there is no example of a comprehensive, online flora or fauna platform based on taxon concepts. The added sophistication of using taxon concept is vital for integrating data collected over long periods of time, during which the circumscription of some names has changed, yet few biodiversity databases include this added “taxonomic intelligence.” As part of our ongoing project to create a new Flora of Alaska, we have developed such a taxonomic informatics infrastructure based on taxon concepts. Taxon concepts are now fully implemented in ARCTOS and names can be explored under the “concept” tab within the taxonomy search (Fig. 5).

ALA and the University of Alaska Museum of the North (UAM) are part of the University of Alaska system and located on the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) campus. It was founded to aid teaching and research within UAF and has major representative natural history and cultural collections from all corners of Alaska, the Circumpolar North, and beyond. In 2015 UAM was designated the official state repository of natural and cultural collections by the State of Alaska in 2015. The museum's collections include more than 1.5 million specimens and artifacts representing millions of years of biological diversity and thousands of years of cultural traditions in the North (http://www.uaf.edu/museum/collections/). The curators are faculty members with a dual appointment in the Museum and in their respective discipline of expertise at UAF, allowing them to access educational funding via the National Science Foundation (NSF) and integrate specimen-based science into their curriculum. UAM provides content for public exhibits and programs, and it is also deeply involved in training tomorrow's professional scientists at all levels of education.

While natural history collections represent primary sources and are used in high-impact science research (Cook et al. 2014, 2016; Wen et al. 2015), they can also be used in object-based learning (Chatterjee 2010; Chatterjee and Duhs 2010) outside of a docent-guided museum tour. Bringing collections and associated research into the classroom provides the opportunity to engage students in real-world science investigations. Science-literate students become citizens with the ability to make informed decisions based on their understanding of STEM fields.

ALA has been involved in several activities centered on emerging opportunities in specimen-based education through the AIM-UP! RCN (Cook et al. 2014, 2016; Lacey et al. 2017, Anderson et al. 2017) and most recently through the AKDatUM RCN (https://akdatum.community.uaf.edu/). As a Professor of Botany in the Department of Biology and Wildlife at UAF, I also use specimen images extensively in my asynchronous delivery of BIOL331 (Systematic Botany). For the lab section of the course I have developed a virtual herbarium tour in ThingLink (https://www.thinglink.com/scene/1406090479749038081), where students can explore annotated specimen images highlighting particular characters of interest with microphotography (Fig. 6).

Alaska and the adjacent regions of Canada and northeastern Russia are a distinct biotic province, often referred to as Beringia. The Beringia region as we know it today extends from the McKenzie River in western Canada to the east as far as the Lena River in Siberia. One of the most important contributions to our understanding of Beringia came from Swedish botanist Eric Hultén's doctoral dissertation in 1937 at Stockholm University entitled: Outline of the history of the Arctic and Boreal biota during the Quaternary period. Hultén's theories, which are widely accepted today, certainly are a body of work important to the story of the assembly of the flora of Alaska. His 1968 Flora of Alaska and its Neighboring Territories is a fabulous textbook containing an unrivaled synthesis of his work and serves as the best manual for the flora of Alaska today. His studies were based on herbarium specimens, and the occurrence dots on his distribution maps in this work are now included in a small mapping tool we created based on herbarium specimens in ARCTOS, and iNaturalist observations for Alaska. The mapping tool is searchable by taxon. For example, see Oxytropis scammaniana Hultén (https://alaskaflora.org/qm/ do?method=detail&taxon=Oxytropis%20scammaniana; Fig. 7).

Most of the exploration of Alaska's flora was through marine botanizing, an interesting phenomenon of relatively safe travel on spacious ships exploring the continents. These included explorations by James Cook (Fig. 8), Thaddaeus Haenke of the Malaspina expedition, Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff and Wilhelm Tilesius on the Krusenstern circumnavigation, and Archibald Menzies on Vancouver's voyage.

The earliest known western botanist who collected plants in Alaska (on the western shore of Kayak Island and Nagai Island) was the German naturalist George Steller who joined Vitus Bering on the second Kamchatka Expedition and early explorations of the Bering Strait in 1741. Interestingly, Linnaeus obtained some of the plants collected by Steller on Kayak Island “under somewhat dubious (unethical, if not illegal) circumstances” (Savage, 1945), and described Tiarella trifoliata L. and Claytonia sibirica L. from Siberia, despite their absence from these areas. The type locality of these plants is probably Kayak Island (Jäger 2008).

Next to collect in Alaska was naturalist and surgeon William Anderson on Captain Cook's third voyage in 1778. The most important historical collections of Alaska plants were made by physician and naturalist Ludolf Karl Adelbert von Chamisso and the entomologist Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz during the Otto von Kotzebue circumnavigation between 1815–1818. The expedition was commissioned by Count Nikolai Romanzoff, Chancellor of the Russian Empire and a patron of science, in search for a northern passage between the Pacific and Atlantic, and to explore the coast of North America and the Pacific Ocean. In his first report to Romanzoff, Chamisso (1818) estimated that they had collected around 2500 species of plants with a third of them being undescribed. After returning to Europe, Chamisso was allowed to take his botanical collections to Berlin for study and publication and the bulk of them remained there until his death (Hiepko 2004; Maaß 2016; Chamisso 1818). A few of the collections described as new to science for Alaska include Habenaria schischmareffiana Cham., Romanzoffia unalaschcensis Cham., Pedicularis purpurascens Cham., Arenaria elegans Cham. & Schltdl., Gentiana aleutica Cham. & Schltdl. and others. Up until Alaska was purchased by the U.S. from Russia in 1867, the Interior remained mostly uncollected, with its exploration becoming more common at the turn of the 20th century.

ALA had its origins in the 1920s as one by one, small, personal herbaria found their way to Fairbanks and were entrusted to the care of the University of Alaska's Department of Biology. These collections came from pioneer scientists in agronomy (George Gasser Collection), range management (L.J. Palmer Collection) and from such eclectic contributions as those of Mardy and Olaus Murie and Otto Geist. During the 1950s a graduate program in wildlife management was established and plant collecting became routine at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Additional specimens were acquired in the late 1950s and early 1960s during the Atomic Energy Commission's Project Chariot, a multi-disciplinary environmental study at Ogotoruk Creek in extreme northwestern Alaska, which include several hundred specimens made by Albert W. Johnson, Leslie Viereck, and Herbert Melchior (Fig. 9).

One notable collector was Jacob Peter Anderson, a native of Iowa who lived in Juneau and travelled extensively throughout Alaska from 1914 to 1953 (Fig. 10). He founded the Juneau Botanical Club and continued to collect and organize his collections throughout his life. He returned to Iowa in 1941 with the largest collection of Alaskan plants, which he expanded through exchange with other botanists. Anderson prepared a flora of Alaska which he published in nine parts in the Iowa State Journal of Science with some 30,000 plant specimens at hand.

The J.P. Anderson Herbarium of Arctic and Boreal Plants was transferred from Iowa State University in Ames on permanent loan to the UA Museum of the North in 2010. This collection consists of about 32,000 specimens mostly of flowering plants (Fig. 11). Anderson arrived in 1914 from Iowa to take up the position of horticulturist at the agricultural experiment station in Sitka, but after three years there moved to Juneau where he became the first commercial florist in the state. He was the driving force for the Juneau Botanical Club whose plant collection is at the Alaska State Museum of Juneau. For many years in the 1920s and 1930s Anderson travelled through the state of Alaska, to some far flung places when getting there and back was an adventure. Anderson's first herbarium was lost to fire in 1924, but the very next year he began again, and eventually, by 1941, amassed another 24,000 specimens.

Anderson was well aware that Eric Hultén of Stockholm had already published a Flora of the Aleutian Islands and was working on a Flora of Alaska. Inasmuch as Hultén did not provide identification keys in his work that would allow an amateur botanist to get full value from his work, Anderson wanted to write a flora that was more accessible. After 20 years in Juneau, Anderson sold his business and accepted an invitation from what was then the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts to bring his collection and enjoy all the benefits of faculty but without the usual teaching responsibilities. He was, in effect, undertaking a large research project leading to his manual of the plants of Alaska.

Thus, the J.P. Anderson collection is the basis for his Flora of Alaska and Adjacent Parts of Canada, which appeared in separate fascicles between 1943 and 1952 and after his death in 1953 was republished as a single book in 1959. It did, indeed, fill the niche Anderson sought, for with the various keys and a knowledge of botanical terms, one could find out the names of the plants of Alaska. The manual was soon sold out and in the late 1960s Stanley Welsh of Brigham Young University and an Iowa State University graduate, began work to produce a revised Anderson's Flora, which appeared in 1974 (Fig. 12). With financial assistance from a bequest that Anderson had established, Welsh was able to make several trips to the state to collect plants (Fig. 10). Additionally, he received collections from others, several thousand sheets, all of which are also part of the J.P. Anderson herbarium, now at ALA.

Our recent acquisition from Iowa State University of the J.P. Anderson Collection (32,000 specimens in 2003) gives us the opportunity to substantially increase the intellectual and outreach value of ALA's holdings. This collection of arctic and boreal plants, which contains 67 nomenclatural type specimens (Fig. 11), formed the basis for much of Anderson's seminal work, The Flora of Alaska. This early Alaska collection is not only important for nomenclatural and taxonomic research, but also provides an important historical insight into the flora of the past. The presence of the J.P. Anderson Herbarium at ALA, now fully accessible, is a significant boost to our collection and our research, especially as many of these specimens are cited by other botanists in numerous early publications.

In 1969 when David F. Murray arrived to become Curator, the Herbarium consisted of about 40,000 vascular plant specimens and several shoeboxes of various mosses and lichens. The establishment of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Trans- Alaska Pipeline and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) during the 1970s provided surveys and specimens from areas that later became Noatak, Gates of the Arctic, and Yukon- Charley National Parks/Preserves. In 1974, ALA was designated a National Resource Collection in the report of the Advisory Committee for Systematic Resources in Botany (American Society of Plant Taxonomists) to NSF. The first Museum building was completed in 1979, which included the 71 cabinets that have housed the main body of the collection until it was purchased by the University of Alaska Museum (Fig. 13).

Most lichen collections in the ALA date from the early post- WWII period, after the Alcan (now Alaska Highway) was completed, including specimens from John Thomson's first of two Alaska expeditions in 1958 on the Arctic Slope as well as his 1967 expedition along the Alaska Highway. The contributions of three other people, H. Persson and W.C. Steere (bryophytes)and H. Krog (lichens), further strengthened the foundation for ALA's cryptogamic collections. Barbara Murray's collecting of lichens (but mostly bryophytes) started in the 1970s just after the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay on the arctic coast of Alaska (Fig. 14). Use of helicopters became frequent and as a result Dr. Barbara Murray collected large numbers of specimens at over 250 Alaska localities (7300 of these specimens are deposited at ALA).

During the 1980s, many additional specimens were collected under research mandated by the Endangered Species Act and were deposited at ALA. In the early 1990s we secured many arctic specimens through NSF International Programs, the National Park Service's Beringia Program, and from collaboration with Russian scientists. As the primary repository for these efforts, we acquired many exceptional specimens, often from previously uncollected areas.

Other growth was through exchanges, which have further broadened high-latitude representation (W. Drury, Kuskokwim River; H. M. Raup, Brintell Lake; A.E. and R.T. Porsild, Ogilvie Mountains; Fredskild et al., Greenland; as well as general collections from Finland and Sweden). Critically important to recent work on the Panarctic Flora are collections from the Russian Far East and central Siberia acquired mostly from the Komarov Botanical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Central Siberian Botanical Garden in Novosibirsk, Russia, but also from our own collecting in the Altai and Sayan Mountains of south-central Siberia (by D. Murray) and Chukotka (by C. Parker and myself). So far, 1608 Russian-language specimen labels from Chukotkan specimens have been translated and databased in ongoing projects supported by the National Park Service, the Council on Library and Information Resources' Hidden Collections Program, and NSF. Resulting from these efforts were numerous documented range extensions as well as information to otherwise botanically unexplored areas. During this time, Alaska has become the rich source for revisions, monographs, floristic surveys, and phylogenetic studies of its plants that it remains today, and ALA has served as the premier repository for Alaska and other arctic floras.

Collecting activities and interest from federal agencies has continued to be strong through the 1990s to present. The past decade has been a transitional time for the herbarium with the retirement of David Murray in 1994, who continues to remain active in arctic floristics at ALA. Elena Conti was Curator from 1997–1999, followed by Amy Denton (2001–2003). Collections Manager Alan Batten and Research Associate Carolyn Parker maintained continuity and kept ALA running during that turn-over of curators. Both Batten and Parker have formed and sustained close-knit relationships with state and federal agencies and are responsible for most recent floristic inventories at ALA. Carolyn Parker has contributed some 18,000 specimens to ALA, has annotated 10,000 specimens in ARCTOS documenting numerous range extensions, and several of her collections are the basis of new species (Draba mulliganii Al-Shehbaz, Eritrichium boreale D.F.Murray, Eritrichium grandiflorum D.F.Murray, Papaver roseoalbum Björk, Parrya nauruaq Al-Shehbaz, J.R.Grant, R.Lipkin, D.F.Murray & C.L.Parker). Al Batten similarly has been instrumental in organizing and expanding the collections at ALA. He has contributed nearly 10,000 specimens and has made several collections that are the basis of species new to science (Papaver roseoalbum Björk, Draba murrayi G.A.Mulligan, and Potentilla psychrophila Soják).

At present, Curator Emeritus, Dr. David Murray, and Dr. Reidar Elven, Professor at the Natural History Museum of Oslo, Norway, are continuing their work on the Panarctic Flora with particularly vexing taxonomic puzzles in the flora of Alaska and Beringia (Fig. 15). Murray and Elven have reviewed many problematic genera for the flora of Alaska and have a combined total of nine taxonomic and phylogenetic papers on the flora of Alaska and Beringia (Elven et al., 1999, 2010, 2011; Murray & Elven, 2007, 2011; Elven & Murray, 2008; Ertter et al., 2008; Murray et al., 2009, 2010). Their combined knowledge is invaluable to providing insight into the many taxonomic puzzles that have plagued botanists in Beringia for many years. Elven will travel to Alaska in 2022 and together with Murray they will review the literature since their last collaborative work on the PAF list in 2010, and make entries and comments to both ALA holdings as well as the Panarctic flora. The most important aspect of the visit will be examining together the specimens at ALA and making judgments and writing comments, since the greatest value of PAF lies in the annotations.

Currently ALA includes Curator Steffi Ickert-Bond, two graduate students (one Ph.D. student and one M.S. student), two undergraduate curatorial assistants, Curator Emeritus David Murray, active Research Associates Carolyn Parker and Campbell Webb, and a few volunteers. Because of Alaska's northern latitude, the plants of Alaska are being affected by climate change more than those of any other US state. Species ranges are shifting, and whole vegetation types are changing. Monitoring and understanding these changes is vital for managing Alaska's fragile biological resources. An estimated 50 million pounds of wild foods are harvested annually by subsistence users in Alaska, including fish, game, many berries, and other flora (State of Alaska 2021). With the many gaps in our understanding of the flora of Alaska, ALA is always looking to take on motivated students eager to explore the flora of the last frontier.

Stefanie M. Ickert-Bond, Professor of Botany, Department of Biology and Wildlife, and Curator, Herbarium (ALA), University of Alaska Museum of the North, University of Alaska Fairbanks, smickertbond@alaska.edu

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