Our Research

Laurentian’s Herbarium (international code SLU) was created in the early 1960s by Dr. Yvan Carrier, s.j., and Dr. Wyn Y. Watson, the first chairs of the University's Department of Biology. In 1964, Captain Edmund A. Turnau joined the Department. He contributed an extensive collection of Malayan ferns and made significant local collections. Over the past 40 years, under the curatorship of Prof. Keith Winterhalder, the herbarium has expanded to more than 20,000 specimens through collections from the Great-Lakes-St. Lawrence Forest, Boreal Shield, James Bay Lowland and High Arctic ecozones, by various biology students and professors. The worldwide flora, including that of Australia, Europe and South America, is also represented by faculty collections.

The herbarium has received many gifts, including the collections of Gerard Gardner (Northern Quebec and Labrador), Dieter Ropke (Northwestern Ontario), and R.S.W. Bobette (Ontario and North America). Specimens have been exchanged with herbaria from Queen’s University, Carleton University, the National Herbarium in Ottawa, the Université de Sherbrooke, the Regional Museum of natural Science in Torino, Italy, and the Jagellonian University in Krakow, Poland. The Herbarium regularly lends specimens and provides information to researchers, and has participated in the "Rare Vascular Plants of Ontario" project and the "Flora of Manitoulin Island." The herbarium is currently participating in a project to create a database of specimens from northern Ontario located in the herbaria of Laurentian University, Nipissing University, Algoma University College, Lakehead University, Lake Superior State University, the Great Lakes Forestry Centre, the Ontario Forest Research Institute, the Royal Ontario Museum and the Moose Cree First Nation.

Botanists, students and naturalists interested in using or contributing to the Herbarium are invited to contact Dr. Peter Ryser.

What is an herbarium? An herbarium is a collection of dry, pressed plant specimens. They are grouped according to taxonomic similarities in airtight cabinets. Each specimen is identified to the species level and annotated with information about where and when it was obtained and who collected it. Typically, local plants will be most well represented, but herbaria can also contain a wide range of species from around the world.

What is an herbarium used for? The herbarium documents biodiversity, and information contained in it can help us map current distributions of plants and compare them to past distributions. As such, we can get a better understanding of what our landscape looked like before intensive human settlement, how activities such as climate change have altered plant communities, and finally, identify “hot spots” for conservation.