Pullen Herbarium
The Pullen Herbarium on campus is a collection used in teaching and in research to document changes in plant distribution through time.
Pullen Herbarium
An herbarium is a museum collection of plants and the information from where and when they were collected. This collection is used in teaching and in research to document changes in plant distribution through time.
The Department of Biology’s Pullen Herbarium—located in Shoemaker Hall and curated by Dr. Lucile McCook—is named after the first curator, Dr. Thomas M. Pullen, and now consists of 80,000+ plant specimens. These specimens consist of dried, pressed plants attached to big sheets of high-quality paper, so they can be stacked in folders and organized by scientific name. While a majority of the specimens are from Mississippi and the southeastern US, the herbarium includes collections from all over the world from the late 1800s to the present.
National Science Foundation grants support the imaging and digitization of the Pullen Herbarium, so that all the collections are available and searchable on a community-based web portal: Southeast Regional Network of Expertise & Collections. Plants can be searched—115 herbaria at once—by scientific name, common name, plant family, geographic area, and more.
Recently, fungal collections of Dr. Pat Miller are being protected and curated in the Pullen Herbarium. The ~300 collections and beautiful photographs of the mushroom fruiting bodies are on display at the Mycology Collections Portal.
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UM Field Station Vegetation Data Set
This digital database of plant specimens was collected by Dr. Marjorie Holland and her botany students. The digital database consists of understory and overstory data—both containing data sheets of plant specimens collected in long term monitoring plots established by Dr. Holland and her students in 1996 and the collected specimens that are stored in Dr. Holland’s lab at the Field Station. The understory data were collected from 1996 to 2016, and the overstory data were collected from 1999 to 2018. These data sheets contain important information about species collected at the field station over 20 years.
Understory Data Overstory Data