The Putnam Museum’s herbarium is available as part of the Plants of Iowa project.
THE PLANTS OF IOWA PROJECT
The Plants of Iowa project provides information about Iowa’s plants. At present the major focus is to document the plant specimens housed in Iowa’s smaller herbaria.
Inventories of the collections at Cornell College, Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, Iowa Lakeside Laboratory and Wartburg College have been completed. Each inventory provides the herbarium with a complete catalog of the information listed on the labels of all specimens in the collection which can be edited and/or expanded as necessary. Additionally, all of the data are posted online for use by the public.
Digitization of the Putnam herbaria was supported by the Iowa Native Plant Society and the Iowa Science Foundation.
The Plants of Iowa project is transforming small herbaria from cloistered cabinets of dry plants to repositories of abundant, easily accessed, natural history information. The assembled data can be used in a wide variety of research, educational and societal investigations about invasive species, plant distributions, genetics, rare species, climate change, phenology, ecology and many others topics. In addition, the project strives to encourage others to become involved in the completion of a statewide database of the specimens housed in all of Iowa’s small herbaria.
To learn more about the Plants of Iowa project, contact Nick Stoynoff at mr_sto@att.net.
For more information about the Putnam’s collection, please contact Christine Chandler, Curator of Natural Science, at cchandler@putnam.org, or call (563) 324-1054 ext.226.
