Q. Collection of plant specimens?
Collection of plant specimens is essential for taxonomic research. These circumscribe species and document their variability. Plant material is carefully selected, pressed and preserved. While collecting specimens, both plants and animals, locations and habitat information is recorded, some features like flower colour and fragrance is noted because these are evident in living plants and are not easily observed in dried materials. For identification and research an intact and complete plant is collected.
Representative leaves and reproductive structures are essential. The flowers, fruits and seeds of flowering plants are especially important. You have already read about the herbarium methodology in Unit 5. By now you must have understood that herbaria are the repository of "original documents" that is specimens upon which all our knowledge of the taxonomy, evolution, and distribution of the flora rests. The collected specimens provide a standard reference collection for verifying the identification of newly collected plants. It documents the presence of a species at particular location and provides data on its geographic range and also points out the existence of classification problems. It also provides plant material and data in the form of vegetative and reproductive morphology, pollen samples, leaf samples for chemical analysis, anatomical samples and also ecological, economical and ethnobotanical data from the labels. Each label contains the information about local name, scientific name, locality, habitat, date of collection, name of collector and collection number. The labels are glued by one edge to the lower right comer of the herbarium sheet.