‘A Fountain of Research’: Cornell’s Plant Pathology Herbarium Enables Novel Mycology Research
Founded in 1907 by Cornell mycologist former Prof. Herbert H. Whetzel, plant pathology, the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, or CUP, is the fourth largest museum of fungi in North America, home to nearly 400,000 fungal specimens.
Mycology, the scientific study of fungi, is a rapidly developing field. According to Teresa Iturriaga, the curator of CUP, only about five percent of the estimated ten million species of fungi have been discovered. Herbaria like CUP are systematically organized collections of preserved plant diseases and fungal specimens that provide mycologists — scientists who study fungi — with resources about plant diseases, biodiversity, climate change and more.
CUP primarily serves as a lending library, exchanging fungi with mycologists around the world for use in research in systematics, evolution and ecology. The herbarium holds more than seven thousand type specimens, and they are collected both locally in Upstate New York, as well as internationally from regions such as Brazil, Hawaii and China.
For Iturriaga, a key component of her daily work involves preparing specimens for lending at the request of other researchers.
“A herbarium serves as a fountain of research, like a library of specimens for research purposes,” Iturriaga said. “I exchange the specimens that people need to do their research. At the same time, for my own research, I ask for specimens from other herbaria across the world.”
After a CUP specimen is acquired, it is pressed with cardboard until it is dried and flat, according to Bob Dirig, the former curator of CUP and current honorary curator of lichens. Each dried specimen is then assigned an identification number and placed in an archival box or envelope, ready to be added to the herbarium.
The specimen’s data is also uploaded to MyCoPortal, an online database documenting the distribution of fungi across North America. CUP is currently digitizing its collections, which requires scanning the herbarium’s extensive index card catalog and photographing all of its type specimens.
CUP enters hundreds of specimens into its collection each year, including newly discovered species of fungi. Because ideas about a species of fungus can change as more specimens are found or as mycologists learn more about the species’s evolutionary relationships, the process of naming a fungus is crucial for its classification, according to CUP poster guides.
Mycologists at Cornell have given names to hundreds of new fungal species over the last century. Kathie Hodge, the director of CUP, personally named the fungi Hypocrella hirsuta — “the hairy one”— as well as Harposporium cerberi — “for the hound that guards the gates of Hell.”
Fungus specimens serve as valuable markers of environmental change, according to CUP guides. The spread of plant diseases over time and space, changes in fungal species biodiversity and fluctuations in geographic distributions of fungi over time can all be indicators of climate change.
According to CUP volunteer Mary McKellar, mycology represents “the best snapshot in time of the natural history of a particular location. It allows you to examine how things have changed and how human activity has impacted the natural system.”
CUP is also working on a major project to digitize the herbarium’s collections, making them accessible to a broader audience. The collections at CUP date back to 1907, when Whetzel, the first chair of the Cornell Plant Pathology department, established a department herbarium, donating from his personal collection.
Through the current project, thousands of Atkinson’s photographs and pages of notes have been database and scanned for digital browsing, and are available to the public through the CUP photograph collection website. Finding individual specimens and data in Atkinson’s collections was previously impossible because of the old taxonomic system of organization, but the digitization of the collections will allow users to easily find any specimen.
The digitization project also encompasses CUP’s lichen collections. In addition to mushrooms, CUP also holds an extensive collection of lichens, originating locally from New York State as well as Latin America, Antarctica, Madagascar and more. CUP is currently working with many other herbaria to build a database of North American lichen specimens.
The CUP staff hope that the herbarium and its resources can become more well-known to the public. The herbarium also holds an open house every fall, where CUP staff, students and volunteers give personalized tours of the collections. Each spring, the herbarium holds its first morel contest, where contestants race to be the first to find a true Morchella fungus within fifteen miles of Ithaca.
“I understand a lot of people don’t really know about this place,” Dirig said. “But it’s wonderful — the access and parking and everything. It’s completely accessible to people in a way that’s hard to imagine.”
Tania Hao can be reached at [email protected].