April 22nd, 7 pm CST
George Washington Carver (1865?-1943) is best known for his promotion of the peanut as a soil-restoring crop, and of the use of peanuts as an agricultural product. The peanut was only one of many of Carver’s interests. He was a conservationist, a chemist, an orchid grower, a painter, a musician, and a mycologist! He studied mycology as a student at Iowa Agricultural, and in Alabama at the Tuskegee Institute. His fungal specimens were important in the documentation of the biodiversity of the southern U.S., and the nation. He was scrupulous in his documentation, and his specimens were distributed nationwide through his collaboration with Job B. Ellis, a New Jersey farmer who was one of the first mycologists in the U.S. Specimens collected by Carver can be found in a number of herbaria in the U.S. and abroad. Herbaria are collections of dried plants and fungi that document earth’s vegetation, past and present.
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Meeting ID: 820 4598 7867
Passcode: Carver
About the Speaker
Dr. Barbara M. Thiers, Patricia K. Holmgren Director of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium
Dr. Thiers oversees the Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, the largest herbarium in the Western Hemisphere, and third largest in the world.
She is also the Editor of Index Herbariorum, the on-line guide to the world’s approximately 3400 herbaria and 12,000 associated staff. Barbara is particularly interested in the application of information technology to herbarium management, and to increasing access to specimen-based data for the scientific community.
She is also the President of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists (2020-2021), Past President of Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (2020-2022), a member of the Board of the Natural Science Collections Alliance, and member of the External Advisory Board of iDigBio, the national collections digitization hub. She is am also a co-author of the recent National Academies of Sciences and Engineering report on biological collections.
A specimen of fungi collected by Carver in Tuskegee, Alabama, that he sent to Job B. Ellis and distributed in the exsiccati series Fungi Columbiani. Based on this specimen, Ellis described the new species, Metasphaeria carveri. Image courtesy of the C. V. Starr Virtual Herbarium of the New York Botanical Garden.