News Updates and Information

3 December 2007

The Herbarium (L Raulerson, PI) was awarded a two-year grant of $100,000 from the National Science Foundation entitled "Improvements to the GUAM Herbarium." The grant will provide funding to replace the Herbarium's aging cabinets, as well as undergraduate assistantships to help digitise its collections of phanerogams, pteridophytes and marine plants.

21 October 2007

Dr. Byung Lae Choe, Professor in the Department of Biology, Sung Kyun Kwan University, Seoul, South Korea visits the Herbarium to examine the phanerogam collections.

15 October 2007

At the request of the U.S. National Park Service, Herbarium Curator Dr. Lynn Raulerson certifies identifications of plants known from the American Memorial Park, Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The Herbarium first provided the park with an assessment of its vegetation in 1989. Voucher specimens are curated at the Herbarium, with duplicates deposited at the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, and the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.

15 August 2007

The Herbarium, in collaboration with the Harold L. Lyon Arboretum (HLA) and the University of Hawai’i at Manoa Herbarium (HAW), was awarded a National Science Foundation EPSCOR grant to develop a regional virtual herbarium cyberinfrastructure network. The project will support the enhancement of botanical research cyberinfrastructure within tropical Pacific region, specifically the formation and development of a new shared network for the regional herbaria. The purpose of the network will be to develop and implement shared data hosting between collections of the participating herbaria.

4 April 2007

We respond to a newspiece in Science on the efficacy of maintaining "greenbelts" of coastal forests as a buffer against pontential damage and mortality from future tsunamis. Coastal forests as buffer zones are being advocated by many environmental organisations and intergovernmental agencies; new forests are being planted or considered by several countries. We suggest that more empirical study is needed to better understand the quantitative relationship between coastal vegetation and wave mitigation.

15 February 2007

Dr. Shigeo Masayama of the College of Arts and Sciences, Tokyo Women's Christian University, visits the Herbarium to assess the species status of Micronesian Ceratopteris (Parkariaceae). He finds that Guam's native morph is a distinct species from the one found on Palau.

25 November 2006

The Herbarium accessions its 46,000th specimen of phanerogam or pteridophyte, for a total of over 57,000 specimens. This milestone was reached after a rapid phase of growth beginning in 1981, when the Herbarium housed a total of only 7,500 specimens. The average rate of growth since then has been nearly 2,000 specimens per year. Most of this growth has been through the addition of phanerogams or pteridophytes. However, with the recent hire of our Associate Curator, Dr. Tom Schils, the collections of marine plants have also begun to increase rapidly, as well.

20 August 2006

St. Johns High School senior Rajkaran Sachde presents the results of his summer university-supported internship with the Herbarium. Mr Sachede sought to identify genetic markers for distinguishing cultivars of Pandanus tectorius Park. in the Marshall Islands, where varieties of this species have long been selected by clans and families for the different flavors of their fruits.

10 July 2006

Dr. Etienne J. Faye, a marine botanist with the Coastal and Estuarine Environment Group in Yokosuka, Japan presents a lecture on a taxonomic study of the seagrass genus Halophila (Hydrocharitaceae) from Japan: reinstatement of Halophila euphlebia Makino on the basis of morphology and ITS sequences.

1 March 2006

The Herbarium welcomes aboard a new Associate Curator, Dr. Tom Schils, who specialises in marine plants. Tom joins us from the University of Ghent, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. Tom has a primary appointment as an Assistant Professor of Marine Botany, The Marine Laboratory.

7 February 2006

The UOG Herbarium website goes live. A summary of the event is posted in the American Society of Plant Taxonomists Newsletter at http://www.aspt.net/.

27 November 2005

The Marianas Audobon Society invites Herbarium Curator Dr. Lynn Raulerson to present a lecture on the vegetation of the second largest island in Micronesia, Babeldaob in Palau.

15 June 2005

The Herbarium accessions its 43,000th specimen of phanerogam or pteridophyte. The collections have grown over five-fold since 1981 and have increased by 12,000 specimens since 1990.