NCW Beadle Herbarium (NE)
The NCW Beadle Herbarium (NE) at UNE consists of c.70 000 vascular plant specimens, housed in a purpose built facility. Herbarium NE is an internationally recognised Herbarium. Herbarium NE is able to exchange specimens with, borrow from and lend to other recognised herbaria.
The herbarium fulfils several major roles:
- Resource for taxonomic, ecological and other university and herbarium research
- Repository for scientific vouchers that underpin various biological activities such as plant classification, vegetation surveys, rare and threatened plant investigations, botanical studies, etc.
- Provider of data for clients
Major goals:
To adequately perform the roles outlined above, the operations of the herbarium must work towards the following:
- To ensure the conservation of historically and scientifically valuable specimens. To this end the physical environment of the herbarium must be maintained so that risks to specimens, especially from insects, fire, water and mishandling, are minimised.
- To continue incorporation of high quality specimens together with high quality label information.
- To continue and upgrade curation of the collection and the specimen database to provide timely and accurate information to herbarium users.
For these reasons, users of the herbarium are requested to comply with the NE policies and procedures.
Collections:
Specimens are housed in two compactus units. All specimens are frozen upon entry for seven days at minus 20 C or colder. The herbarium facility is fumigated with non-residual, low-toxicity insecticide twice a year, and temperature and humidity are carefully controlled by air-conditioning. Insect activity near the herbarium entrance is continuously monitored. All these tactics minimise insect damage to the collection and maximise comfort of the users!
All monocot and non-angiosperm collections are housed in an "open shelf" arrangement. This helps prevent damage that can occur as specimens are being placed into or removed from boxes. This system also allows for easier detection of insect activity, and more thorough coverage during fumigation. In the future the 'dicot' specimens may also be stored in open shelves, but are currently stored on shelves in open boxes.
All type material is safely stored in separate enclosed shelving, and clearly identified as type material. "Dummy" type folders are placed in the main collection to alert users of the presence of types in the type collection.
The collection is protected from fire by a VESDA (Very Early Smoke Detector Alarm) System. In its first year of operation, this system detected smoke from a forest fire over 200 kilometres away.
Resources:
The herabrium has a number of resources at its disposal, including good facilities for pressing and drying specimens, and laboratories for fixing, preserving and studying material using histological, cytological, phytochemical, macromolecular and electron microscope techniques.
Herbarium NE houses a useful collection of botanical and taxonomic journals, monographs and reports, as well as having ready access to the UNE libraries.
Loans and exchanges:
To arrange a loan or exchange please contact the herbarium director - Assoc Prof Jeremy Bruhl.