An Introduction to the Botanical Type Specimen Register

A Catalog of the Genus Carex (Cyperaceae)
STANWYN G. SHETLER (Editor); MARY JANE PETRINI, CONSTANCE GRAHAM CARLEY, M. J. HARVEY, LARRY E.
MORSE (Assistant Editors); THOMAS E. KOPFLER (Programmer); AND COLLABORATORS
Contributing Institutions
The ten American herbaria that have collaborat-
ed in the Carex project to provide data on their re-
sective collections of types in this genus are listed
here in descending order of number of specimens
registered. The name of each herbarium is preceded
by its standard international abbreviation as estab-
lished in the fifth edition of “Index Herbariorum,
Part I, The Herbaria of the World” (Lanjouw and
Stafleu 1964).
NY Herbarium, New York Botanical Garden, Bronx Park,
New York
GH Gray Herbarium, Harvard
Massachusetts
University, Cambridge,
US United States National Herbarium, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D. C.
CAS Herbarium, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco,
California
F John G. Searle Herbarium, Field Museum of Natural
History, Chicago, Illinois
MO Herbarium, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis,
Missouri
DS Dudley Herbarium, Stanford University, Stanford,
UC
California
Herbarium, University of California, Berkeley, California
A Herbarium, Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
JEPS Jepson Herbarium, University of California, Berkeley,
California
Each institution has contributed to the Carex
Catalog voluntarily and with little or no outside
financial support for work on the Type Register.
The FNA program has made use of the Type Register
as a pilot project to evaluate various ways of
collecting, editing, capturing, and processing hierarchically
structured taxon/collection/specimen data.
In the course of this work, therefore, small sums of
“seed” money were allocated from FNA funds to
support data-gathering for the Carex project at sev-
26
eral of the above institutions. The Carex project
was undertaken in the first place at the suggestion of
the FNA Editorial Committee. The Committee saw
in Carex a good model of a large genus with a pre-
ponderance of North American species which pre-
sents a full gamut of nomenclatural and taxonomic
problems to cope with in an information system.
(The Carex project, insofar as FNA was concerned,
went beyond the Type Register. While the data
were being gathered for the Register, other morpho-
logical data were also being assembled by FNA-
unpublished Carex data on Sections Montanae and
Ovules collected by A. J. Gilmartin and M. B.
Moore-to test the matrix techniques of Morse,
197 1, for computer-assisted identification and key
construction.) Once the Carex Catalog was estab-
lished on the basis of several large herbaria, other
major herbaria were able to add their data with a
surprisingly low investment of man-hours. The
Field Museum, for example, reported just under 35
man-hours-less than a man-week-to compile its
data on Carex types, at a cost of under $175 for
technical labor, but by the time the Museum came
into the picture it had the benefit of a basic catalog
already including the contributions of A, GH, MO,
NY, and US.
Each institution determined its own extent of
coverage, and without exception each tried to in-
clude all types in the general herbarium which al-
ready had been segregated or otherwise identified
or which could be identified quickly on the basis of
the available computer printout. At the same time,
none of the herbaria makes any claim to absolute
completeness or thoroughness relative to the num-
ber of types in the herbarium, including those still
buried in the general collection. A pragmatic phi-
losophy prevailed, with each herbarium doing the
best it could under the constraints of its own local