Bill's Botanical Forays

Now that is the off-season for collecting plants, I am spending my time identifying and processing the specimens collected last year. According to my logbook, I collected 928 specimens and after accounting for duplicate specimens, there are about 700 to 750 different species.

We will now send a specimen sheet of each specimen to the National Herbarium at the Smithsonian Institute and keep one specimen sheet for the refuge’s herbarium for mounting and preservation. (Each specimen has two or three specimen sheets.)

I will also take an inventory of the plant species collected and compare the list against what was historically collected on the South and Central Tracts of the Refuge. That way I can determine what plants to look for next season.