Herbarium flourishing at Utah State

LOGAN — Winter cold is sitting as tight as a bottle cap in the mountain valleys, but Utah State University can't think of a better time than now to celebrate Utah's flora and fungi — from delicate poseys to the hardy and poisonous — by officially welcoming the 250,000th specimen at the Intermountain Herbarium this Friday.

Plants and fungi of all sorts cram the herbarium, which is located under a student dining hall on the Logan campus. An open house is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. on Friday, although the facility is open to researchers weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. It offers a variety of public workshops, guided nature walks and Web resources.

The herbarium collection is only a fraction of the size of similar data bases at larger universities, but it is the chief supplier of data on plant and fungi life in the Intermountain West for the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which was opened in 2001 as a worldwide, electronically accessible pool of data on biodiversity.

Plants obviously remain abundant, but they've taken on dramatic changes since the Industrial Revolution, said Herbarium director Mary Barkworth, an associate professor of biology at USU who considers the facility a "treasure trove" of plant information.

People have been logging the life and times of plants for at least 300 years in some areas, but that information is on paper and not available digitally, said Barkworth, noting that the current effort is to monitor changes or trends in real time and have the information available immediately to researchers worldwide.

"Anyone who has wondered about an odd-looking plant when they've been camping or have seen a mushroom while hiking and stopped to consider if it were edible, the answers are probably going to be here," Barkworth said.

Fungi often don't get much of a look, but they are busy and promulgating wherever there's a damp place to root. And their sizes run from the big mushrooms to yeast in bread, molds, rusts and smut — the ever-present enemy of the nation's wheat crops.

Barkworth said fungal plants are easily spotted by their lack of chlorophyll, which makes green plants green. No green means no photosynthesis and that they must survive by being parasites.

"But they're fascinating and fun to learn about," Barkworth said. "Some fungal plants release a digestive enzyme onto a food source that partially dissolves it, thereby making inorganic nutrients available."

Other parasitic types obtain their food directly from the cells of a living food source. Others are symbiotic, such as lichen, which is a combination of fungus and a green alga or a cyanobacterium.