Overview

Collections of preserved plant specimens, known as herbaria, have existed for nearly five centuries. These pressed and labeled plants have been essential resources for scientists, allowing them to describe and differentiate species and to document and research plant changes and biodiversity over time--including changes related to climate. Maura C. Flannery tells the history of herbaria, from the earliest collections belonging to such advocates of the technique as sixteenth-century botanist Luca Ghini, to the collections of poets, politicians, and painters, and to the digitization of these precious specimens today. She charts the growth of herbaria during the Age of Exploration, the development of classification systems to organize the collections, and herbaria's indispensable role in the tracking of climate change and molecular evolution. Herbaria also have historical, aesthetic, cultural, and ethnobotanical value--these preserved plants can be linked to the Indigenous peoples who used them, the collectors who sought them out, and the scientists who studied them. This book testifies to the central role of herbaria in the history of plant study and to their continued value, not only to biologists but to entirely new users as well: gardeners, artists, students, and citizen-scientists.

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Maura C. Flannery is professor emerita of biology at St. John's University, New York, and research affiliate in the A. C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Bitten by the Biology Bug, In the Herbarium, and a blog, herbariumworld.wordpress.com. She lives in Aiken, South Carolina. Coleen Marlo is an accomplished actor and multi-award-winning audiobook voice artist and producer. In 2010 she was named Audiobook Narrator of the Year by Publishers Weekly, and she won the Audie Award for Literary Fiction in 2011. During her distinguished career, she has been nominated twice for Audie Awards by the Audio Publishers Association, has won numerous Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, and has been an AudioFile Earphones Award winner. Additionally, she has been honored with many starred audio reviews by Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. Coleen is a member of the prestigious Actors Studio and taught acting for ten years at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. Furthermore, she is a proud founding member of Deyan Institute of Voice Artistry and Technology. Coleen can be found on the Web at coleenmarlo.blogspot.com and on Facebook at ColeenMarloAudiobook.

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