Duke University recently announced plans to close and re-home its century-old herbarium.

But with climate change and a looming biodiversity crisis, scientists say these preserved collections of old plants are more important than ever.

Today, On Point: The hidden value of herbariums.

Kathleen Pryer, professor of biology and director of the Duke University Herbarium.

Jacquelyn Gill, associate professor of paleoecology and plant ecology, School of Biology and Ecology and Climate Change Institute.

Joyce Onyenedum, assistant professor and principal investigator at NYUs Department of Environmental Studies.

Susan Alberts, dean of natural sciences at Duke University.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: What happens when a little-known place, home to great treasures, may soon have no home at all? That's the puzzle Kathleen Pryer is facing. She's a professor of biology at Duke University and she joins us today. Professor Pryer, welcome to On Point.

KATHLEEN PRYER: Hello. Thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: So what is this little-known place, home to great treasures that you care so much about?

PRYER: I wouldn't call it little-known. The Duke herbarium is perhaps the 6th largest university herbarium in the United States. And it is tied with Cornell. So it's very well known in the area of biodiversity research and climate change research, but it's stunning that now, it's being told it needs to find a better home.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so what, for those people who don't know, can you describe Duke's herbarium a little bit? First of all, what is a herbarium? And then what is in Duke's that's so unique and valuable, as you say, to science?

PRYER: So every herbarium is unique. It's a collection of dried plant materials that have been collected over time from various professors, students, researchers that have gone on explorations, and brought these treasures home. So no herbarium replicates what another herbarium has. It's unique to the history of Duke and the people who worked at the Duke herbarium.

And so our collection of 825,000 specimens is special only to, it's special to Duke. It's not replicated anywhere else.

CHAKRABARTI: And 825,000 specimens, is that the equivalent to the number of different species represented in the collection, or is it just specimens?

PRYER: No, it's just specimens.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So can you just give me a visual tour of what it looks like? How are these specimens stored? When you want to look at them, what do you see?

PRYER: Duke is also well known for a lemur center. And the lemur center is easy to sell when you have creatures with bushy tails and bright eyes.

When you walk into a herbarium, it is a room filled with steel cases. And each case holds about a thousand specimens. And so the Duke herbarium is in two different locations. One is the smallest part of the collection, is within the bio side building, which is slated to go under renovation in the next couple of years. And the larger part of the collection, 70% of the collection is housed in a, essentially, brand-new facility underneath a research building.

... And so when you open a case, you're faced with all these sheets that are stored in boulders. And so these plants, whenever they were pressed and dried, glued to these sheets, are stored according to a very special classification. So they're easy to find and you locate the cabinet you wish, and you go in and have a look at the material that you need to maybe describe a new species, maybe to look at the variation a species encompasses.

CHAKRABARTI: And so are they stored in books? Sheaths? What, how are they stored?

PRYER: The very earliest herbaria, about 500 years ago, were books. And today that stopped a long time ago. And today, specimens are glued on to archival sheets that are 11 by 17 inches. So a very standard sheet size, and in the left, in the right-hand corner of every sheet, is a label that tells you what the plant is or who collected it, when they collected it, where they collected it.

And so it represents a specific plant that existed in a place at a special time and point. And so it has absolutely unique history. An orchid in our collection, say Cypripedium, the pink lady slipper from North Carolina. Other herbaria may have, certainly have specimens of the pink lady slipper, but no one has our specimen.

And so when you look at material from across a breadth of herbaria, you begin to understand the variation within a species. Yeah so we'll talk more about what is going to happen to the Duke herbarium. Because its home is in peril. That's why we're having this conversation with you.

But Professor Pryer, I'd still, I would love to hear a little bit more about some of the remarkable specimens in the collection. I understand there's one called the Lady Gaga fern, is that right?

PRYER: Yes, indeed it is the home to the lady. 15 years ago, my lab group was very intent on listening to her music in the lab while we were looking at herbarium specimens, processing them for extracting their DNA and that sort of thing. And I hadn't heard of her, but watched her on the Grammys in 2010, and she appeared in a costume that was so remarkable in that it looked exactly like the sexual stage of a fern gametophyte. And ferns are what I study.

And so I began to understand more about her music and what she stood for and so we named a group of ferns that is endemic to Southeastern United States and Central America. It was a group of ferns that needed a new name. And we gave it the name Gaga because of her voice as a champion for justice, for compassion and right to individual expression.

CHAKRABARTI: That's a beautiful story. And is there also a genetic component here? Because in terms that you were extracting DNA and looking, obviously, at what the DNA revealed. And please correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that there was also like maybe a section of DNA that was GHEA.

PRYER: So that was the most unexpected part. Was that as DNA is made up of four nucleotides, ACGT, and they occur in random order.

But when we had the sequence data, all aligned at 1 point in a certain gene, there was a molecular signature where the nucleotides G, Alined up for all 19 species of the Gaga fern. And so the closest relatives and that area did not spell out Gaga. They spelled out something else. And so that was taken as a signal to us that we were doing the right thing.

CHAKRABARTI: I love that. I love that story. So let me ask you, what brought you, what made you fall in love with botany and the study of plants and took you to a place where you began, you were the director of, you are still the director of the Duke University Herbarium.

PRYER: I grew up in northern Quebec in Canada, surrounded by nature.

So I've always been fond of going out in the woods and looking at things. And my undergraduate career at McGill University, I was focused on becoming an animal behaviorist. Because I was thrilled with Jane Goodall and her stories and you could major at the time in animal behavior, which I signed up for.

But in my senior year, I took a botany course and the whole trajectory of my life changed. I found my people.

CHAKRABARTI: What is going to happen to Duke's herbarium? When I said earlier that it could soon no longer have a home, what has Duke said it wants to do with this collection?

PRYER: I don't think it really knows. So Duke is celebrating its 100th centennial and this collection is the same age as the university. It's a collection that's been built over a hundred years and it's very well-known across the world for the diversity of plants that we have, not only from a regional area, but also from a global perspective. Especially the neotropics. And it suddenly, we have been taking good care of it for 100 years and we are seeing now as not no longer being a place that should be a steward of such a treasure. It should go somewhere else. And this is rather unbelievable, because it really doesn't need much in order to survive.

The collection I told you about, the 70% of the collection that is in the newer facility, cost a million dollars to refurbish and that money came from NSF and Duke 15 years ago. And that collection is on a mobile carriage system, like you have in library, so you can compact the rows, and the plants are perfectly happy there.

They don't need watering. They just are safe and secure. And it's really a puzzle to us why that facility, which people who visit us marvel at. And wish that they had something so spectacular, that we have to go. And there is no place where it can go, where it could be accepted in its entirety at the present.

And so the idea of it being rifled through and bits and pieces sent to various places, it's actually quite horrific to us.

CHAKRABARTI: So to be clear, Duke is saying that it no longer, the university no longer feels that it's the best place for this herbarium and the implication there being that the space that the herbarium occupies may be better suited for other purposes.

We'll hear from some quotes from a university representative a little bit later in the show, but it really brings home this question, like in modern science, in a modern university, like there's costs and benefits to everything a university undertakes. And how to best balance that is now being played out with the story of Duke University's Herbarium, and we'll have a lot more when we come back. This is On Point.

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