Herbaria: Their role in protecting biodiversity and indigenous knowledge

[Intro] Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.

[00:00:18] Dennis Mckenna: Dr. Barbara Thiers is the director emerita in the Division of Plant Research and Conservation at the New York Botanical Garden.

Prior to her retirement, she was the Patricia K. Holmgren director of the William and Linda Steere Herbarium, the world’s third largest herbarium, housing over 7.9 million collections of algae, bryophytes, fungi, and vascular plant.

She applied her interest in herbarium science and information technology to develop the CV Star Virtual Herbarium, which contains a searchable database of digitised herbarium specimens.

4.5 million specimens so far, with 400,000 added each year.

She is also the editor of the Index Herborarium, the guide to the world’s approximately 3300 herbaria.

Dr. Thiers is widely recognised for her contributions to efforts to digitise the world’s natural history collections. In 2020, to help educate the public as to the importance of herbaria and botanical history, she published a beautifully illustrated book entitled Herbaria the quest to preserve and classify the World’s plants, published by Timber press.

She is past president of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists and past president of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections.

She’s a member of the Board of the Natural Science Collections Alliance and member of the External Advisory Board of iDigBio the National Collections Digitisation Hub. Her many significant contributions to herbarium science and the field of botany are too numerous to list here.

Dr. Thiers, Welcome to the Brainforest Café. We are honoured to have you join us today.

[00:02:36] Dennis Mckenna: It’s very kind of you to give us some time, and I really appreciate it. I wish I don’t actually have a script. I became acquainted with your work, as you know, through Mike Balick at the New York Botanical garden and then your wonderful book herbarium, which has quickly ascended to one of my favourite books in the library. It’s a tremendous piece of work, in my opinion. It’s not only beautiful, but informative, and it’s a wonderful way to tell the world about the importance of herbarium. And as you know, we’re working on a small project, nothing like on the scale of what you’ve done at the New York Botanical Garden to try to restore this herbarium in Iquitos, Peru, whose main virtue is that it’s in the middle of the heart of biodiversity.

[00:03:36] Barbara Thiers: Absolutely.

[00:03:37] Dennis McKenna: I guess what I would like you to do is tell us something about how you came to be involved in this.

What was the attraction for you? Because I think people don’t understand what herbaria even are. You have to explain botanical garden clearly an herbarium. What’s an herbarium, and why is it important?

[00:03:59] Barbara Thiers: Herbarium, in a way, it’s a bit like a library of dried plant specimens, but it’s a little bit different than a library, because the goal of a herbarium is to document the wide range of plant biodiversity. It’s the botanical equivalent of a museum that has dinosaur bones or skins of animals. The herbarium originated in the 16th century in Italy, by a man named Luca Ghini who was looking for a way to teach his students about the medicinal properties of plants. And at that time, the work people generally use, they went back to the classical authors, the many translations of Dioscorides and so forth. But he had the idea that he would make plant collections and put them in a book, and the students could look at the actual thing and study it. It’s very much a renaissance idea. It’s about the time they started using cadavers to teach medical students. So it was all very much a renaissance idea that we’ll learn by actually examining real things. And originally, the herbaria were mostly just collections of some specimens in a book. But when Linnaeus came along, the man who was responsible for developing our kind of approach to naming things and classifying them, he began to get specimens from all over the world. And the book format no longer works because he wanted to put like things together. So once they were glued in the pages of a book, you couldn’t rearrange them when you got new things right. So he came up with the idea of these flat sheets of plants, where plant is glued and they’re sitting on a shelf. And the idea really caught on a lot because of the exploration of the world by Europeans in the 18th and 19th century. And by the end of the 19th century, there were already hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million herbarium specimens. And it was very much a European phenomenon. It did not originate in other parts of the world where there were very impressive and long standing traditions of plant knowledge, but those were done mostly through books and illustrations and not through herbarium specimens. We don’t really know why herbaria still served the purpose of being the reference for determining the identity of a plant and also what characteristics distinguish it from others. And today, there are about 3400 herbaria in the world that collectively hold about 400 million specimens.

[00:06:46] Dennis McKenna: 400 million specimens!

[00:06:50] Barbara Thiers: Yeah. As best we know.

[00:06:51] Dennis McKenna: That is amazing.

[00:06:52] Barbara Thiers: Yeah. And essentially every country, except two or three I can think of, have herbaria. I managed an index to the herbaria of the world, and we add almost 100 herbaria every year. So it is a growing enterprise. It’s a fairly low tech method of tracking plant biodiversity. As long as the specimens are kept flat and dry and free from insects, they tend to last almost indefinitely.

[00:07:21] Dennis McKenna: So it seems to me, from the perspective of a non herbarium person, but who respects what herbaria are all about, is that herbaria are important. They’re important in many ways, but they provide a kind of a temporal map of the history of the flora of a place, as well as a usage in some ways. They provide profiles on the usage and geographically. So those kind of axes of information make these things, make herbaria quite valuable resources but I think they’re under appreciated.

[00:08:11] Barbara Thiers: Definitely, yes, they are under appreciated. Sort of the idea of this is being, and it’s really true for all museum collections, as being sort of quaint artifacts of the past. They often when you talk about any kind of collections, the word dusty comes up as if things are not really used, they’re just mementos of some sort, which is ridiculous and it’s infuriating because.

[00:08:37] Dennis McKenna: Certainly could be said of many libraries. Well, that’s a library.

[00:08:41] Barbara Thiers: Yes, that’s true.

[00:08:42] Dennis McKenna: Dusty volumes, but it doesn’t diminish its value.

[00:08:44] Barbara Thiers: No.

Herbaria are used constantly. I don’t have any records beyond New York Botanical Garden, but we had 2000 days worth of visitors from often as many as 60 different countries in the course of a given years. And people travel to, we now digitise specimens so people can look at them online. But you can’t dissect an image, you can’t really use them. People still need to travel to view them. And herbaria, because of how they’re preserved and how they’re maintained, there’s a lot of other uses that have come up. In the 1990s it was determined that you could get DNA from herbarium specimens and at first it was only recent ones and you didn’t get very much and it wasn’t very good. But that’s been refined greatly. And as it turns out, when we get to doing whole genome sequences, herbarium specimens are sort of pre adapted for that because the DNA is already kind of broken up into little pieces, which is the first thing you do, when you do genomic sequences. You break the DNA up and then put it back together. So what that means is that people can make comparisons on grand scales about a wide range of plants at a much smaller cost than if they had to go and collect them or find them in the field. In many cases, probably that many species don’t even exist.

[00:10:10] Dennis McKenna: Exactly. Some of these species are extinct. So herbaria is a bridge to the past, as you say. I mean, we think of it as this 19th century Victorian kind of the spoils of exploration and all this and I mean, there are criticisms levelled at it. But on the other hand, a point that I’m making in my presentation here at the conference is that herbaria are exemplary of something that science does that, doesn’t really get appreciated, which is observation.

[00:10:48] Barbara Thiers: Right.

[00:10:48] Dennis McKenna: And we think of science as experimental.

[00:10:50] Barbara Thiers: Right.

[00:10:51] Dennis McKenna: But an equally important part of it is exploration. Like what’s out there.

[00:10:57] Barbara Thiers: Exactly.

[00:10:57] Dennis McKenna: And Herbaria are a place where these discoveries can be documented. And as you say now with the DNA technology, other types of technology, they’re far from a quite relic of the 19th century. I mean, very relevant to what is going on, particularly with respect to climate change and all of those factors.

[00:11:20] Barbara Thiers: Absolutely, yes.

[00:11:21] Dennis McKenna: I mean, there are a lens on those processes.

[00:11:24] Barbara Thiers: Yes. And now that we have so many data that are digitised. You can look at them on just larger scales than you ever could before, and you can begin to develop, if you know where plants grew, and you can put that point on a map. We’re using GIS technology. You can characterise where it lives, and then you can begin to make projections about with climate change, how might the distribution of species change?

[00:11:49] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:11:50] Barbara Thiers: So species modelling is greatly empowered by these vast quantities of data. And the other thing, too, is each plant has its own cycle for when it flowers and fruits and so forth, and that’s very closely linked to its pollinators and to the animals that disperse it. One of our great fears of climate change is that we’ll be disrupting those cycles, those very finely tuned cycles. And we can study using herbarium sheets, which generally present a plant with flower or fruit, because those are key features for identification.

We know when and where it was collected, and we can look over time to see how flowering and fruiting patterns are changing, and indeed they are. And then you can also then correlate that with insect collections, with bees and things like that.

[00:12:40] Dennis McKenna: Exactly.

So it becomes much more than just a dusty library of dried plant specimens. It’s actually a window into the past and a window into the future, in a sense, or the presence because of climate change and all of this. Tell me what brought you into this? How did you get it? I mean, I take it your degree is in botany.

[00:13:06] Barbara Thiers: It is, and it’s not the typical path. So my father was a mycologist, studied macro, fungi, mushrooms, and he was the curator, founder and curator of the herbarium at San Francisco State University, where he worked for his more than 40 years. And as a kid, I spent a lot of time going on field trips, most of my weekends, and things were collecting mushrooms. But then there was also the preservation of the specimens side of it. And I think mostly to get me out of my mother’s hair, he would take me on weekends to the herbarium, and I could help out. And so I helped him do a variety of things. And up until the time I was a teenager, I put in a lot of time helping him. I loved hanging around his students.

The people who go into these fields are often motivated in a variety of ways, but they’re often kind of interesting people. And I love being around them.

[00:14:03] Dennis McKenna: Fairly eccentric. Eccentric, but in a good way.

[00:14:06] Barbara Thiers: Yeah, in a good way. And they were all very passionate about pursuing their interest in natural history and biodiversity. And of course, I drifted away in high school. I wanted nothing more to do with any of that. But I found my way back because the people I knew who seemed happiest in what they did on a day to day basis were people who were again pursuing a study of natural history in some way. And so I thought that’s the kind of life I would like to have. Now, the herbarium may or may not have figured into my long term plans, but I was particularly interested in bryophytes in mosses and liverworts. And because nobody seemed to study them much, I got interested, and I went and I found someone who would direct my PhD work in that. And when I was done, I was offered a few teaching jobs. But what intrigued me the most was a postdoctoral fellowship at the New York Botanical Garden because I knew they had a fabulous herbarium. And in the particular groups that I was interested in, no one had touched those collections in many years. So I went for a one year postdoc, and I ended up staying. It was nothing like my dad’s little herbarium.

Maybe he had 60,000 specimens. This was 7 million. And it was on a totally different scale. Before I knew it. I was completely captivated with the challenge of this collection. At that time, though, when I went there, there was a huge effort in partnership with the Brazilian government to document the floor of the Amazon. And so there were people coming and going all the time on expeditions. There were many Brazilian botanists around the whole time. It was a very exciting thing to be engaged in. And a part of the project that was supposed to happen it was way before its time was to be digitising all of these collections, making a big computer database of all the floor of Brazil. But this was in the early 1980s, and nobody really knew how nobody was doing that. Everybody knew what we wanted, but there was just an obstacle around every corner. So that kind of became my thing to figure out at New York. How could we employ computers to capture information and I loved it.

[00:16:25] Dennis McKenna: So you came into the New York Botanical Garden and through, I take it, several steps, you became the director of the Herbarium, which was already huge, and there was a huge infrastructure. But the virtual herbarium is kind of your creation, you had this vision to create this virtual Herbarium, and now everybody does it. But back in the day, you were a pioneer.

[00:16:56] Barbara Thiers: It was a very…

[00:16:59] Dennis McKenna: Something that immediately comes to mind is, given the challenges that we’re facing, how did you fund this?

[00:17:10] Barbara Thiers: So, that was where being in the New York Botanical Garden came in handy at about the same time that I was beginning to imagine how this could be done.

I had played around with a bunch of databases that you could purchase, and I figured out how to do it. I knew what I was doing wouldn’t scale for the whole thing, but I learned some programming. I got a little experience under my belt, enough that I knew what we wanted. We happened to have a new president of the Garden, Gregory Long came to us from the art world he was keen to make a big splash for himself at the Garden and for all of us and he wanted big ideas, what should we do? And I said we should digitise the herbarium, I mean, in stages. And being a new CEO. There were donors who were interested in supporting these sorts of things. So I think our first money was from a private foundation. I don’t remember which one now, but it was enough to get us started. And what we really needed was a computer expert, somebody who kind of knew how to build this. And we had funds for a few years to get started and fits and starts. It took a while, but I had the support of the Gardens administration because this ended up being one of the big ideas that arose from the first strategic plan that we did with this new CEO. So the timing was right. Then, the National Science Foundation was really the main funder of this. I think we got our first grant in maybe the mid ninetys.

Oh, We also developed, we’re very keen on taking pictures of these things, and digital photography. Our first camera, I think we paid $20,000 for pictures that aren’t nearly as good as you get on your phone these days. But again, we had the help of the Xerox Foundation in that case, who helped us figure out how to take pictures of things. And then there was the challenge of how to put them online. But the approach we always took was, let’s just try it. Let’s try it on a small scale, and we’ll learn from it, and then we’ll step back and we’ll see if there’s a way to do it better. So with some luck and a vision of what this could be one of the main reasons that motivated me was the idea of repatriating data and I had Brazil specifically in mind but it would work for any place because of know the colonial history of how science and museums developed. There were early days when things were taken and very little was given back. But I was very profoundly affected by the partnership that the garden developed through this bridge to the Flora Amazonica project of the 1980s and how it really was meant to be an equal partnership. And I don’t know, I hope it was I wasn’t really inside enough, but certainly it seemed to be a partnership. But I realised all of Brazilian scientists who came to New York, they were seeing their own plants. They were the history of their own plants and, I mean, we could have decided…

[00:20:20] Dennis McKenna: What are these doing here?

[00:20:22] Barbara Thiers: We could just given them back, I mean, that would have been one solution but instead we didn’t what we did was we said let’s take pictures of them and make them available, and again, I still think there’s a strong reason for repatriating specimens. The thing about botanical specimens is many of them are collected in duplicate.

[00:20:45] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:20:46] Barbara Thiers: One of the innovations of Projecto Flora was that for every plant collected, there would be half of all the material would stay in Brazil, and the other half would go to other institutions. And even in the early days, even in the 19th century explorations, there were duplicates of these specimens made. But I still think an excellent project would be to make sure that of everything that was ever collected in Brazil, that at least one representative resides in Brazil, and maybe more. I think our problem would be finding them all among the world Siberia, but I still think it would be a worthwhile thing to do. But it was all really about sharing back this knowledge.

[00:21:25] Dennis McKenna: It does seem that there are aspects of it that are overwhelming in terms of there is so much to document, for example, with this littler herbarium in Iquitos that we’re approaching.

I’ve had a relationship with the curator for over 50 years.

He was a student when I was a student, and we met in 1981, and we’ve kept working together, and he eventually became the curator of the herbarium.

But the herbarium, I mean, it’s problematic largely because of lack of funding, general neglect, and a lot of sort of perception at the university level that this is a waste of time. Why are we spending resources? Well, they’re not. So the situation with the Iquitos Herbarium is that it has 150,000 specimens, but only 50,000 have actually been mounted and cataloged and entered into the… So what we’re trying to do this daunting task of unpack those other 100,000 specimens and somehow get those integrated into the collection. I envision this happening through armies of work study students. Basically, if we can get the funds, there are students that could do this work, and they do. And that’s going to be a huge project. And we’re trying to raise about $10 million for this, which I think, people say, My God, $10 million. But actually that’s a small amount compared to what it must have taken to create the CV Star herbarium, for example.

[00:23:16] Barbara Thiers: Yeah.

I’m not sure I ever really totalled it up, but I know we had well over 10 million in NSF funds alone, and that’s not counting all the private money that we were raised.

[00:23:29] Dennis McKenna: Right?

[00:23:29] Barbara Thiers: Yeah.

[00:23:30] Dennis McKenna: This is where having the New York Botanical Garden behind you is. It’s a tremendous vehicle for raising funds because they have the reputation.

[00:23:42] Barbara Thiers: Right.

[00:23:43] Dennis McKenna: But I think that many philanthropists, people that want to support the botanical garden, you have to kind of convince them, say, okay, you’ve got the living collections, and those are wonderful, but you have to convince them, see, the value of the herbarium. They’re not as exciting.

[00:24:01] Barbara Thiers: Right.

[00:24:01] Dennis McKenna: But they’re in some ways maybe more important, than the living collections.

[00:24:05] Barbara Thiers: Yeah, absolutely.

It becomes a bit abstract because the real value of herbarium data is in the aggregate. We used to always give tours and show people, oh, I don’t know, a specimen collected by Darwin or a specimen collected by some other famous person. And those are the kind of the wow factor. It’s an interesting artifact, but it wasn’t really telling the value of them because it’s the value of all of them together. And in Iquitos, it’s the value of that 150,000 altogether. I’m sure you can pick out individual specimens that are critical.

[00:24:44] Dennis McKenna: But I have many times demonstrate to people specimens that I collected, or Al Gentry or Richard Schultes or all of these famous names. But most of the work was done by botanists who, for one reason or another, they made those collections, and they were not famous. But the work that they did, as you say, in aggregate, it’s very important.

How do we educate the public to understand this and realize how important this is for all sorts of issues right now? Evolution and climate change and the whole historicity of it, too.

Evolution.

[00:25:35] Barbara Thiers: Well, I find that people are generally quite interested in herbaria. People like museums. They like to go behind the door. They like to see things. What you need is some stories, some stories with those very specimens that tell a story that is relevant to those people, plants that grow in a place that doesn’t have any vegetation anymore because it’s been all cut down for one thing or another. That’s kind of a sad story.

[00:26:02] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:26:03] Barbara Thiers: But the people, too, the stories behind the people are captivating. And in a time when we’re trying to emphasise the contributions of the less well known people, especially those in developing country, I imagine there are fabulous stories about some of the people who collected those specimens.

And those can be quite engaging for folks. It takes a little work up front to develop these stories. Another one that you can often tell is the relationship between a flower and whatever pollinate. It’s captivating people in small groups. You don’t get thousands at a time and introduce them to these things. And the university administration, administrators don’t know what they have. They don’t know the power of it.

[00:26:49] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:26:50] Barbara Thiers: Another thing they don’t understand the value, the educational value of these herbarium specimens. You mentioned an army of work study students, and yes, that’s probably the type of labor that they’ll be able to get at the price they need to get it for. But those students are having the opportunity to learn a tremendous amount about the botany of them because perhaps they’ll be asked to sort of verify and who knows what the label data are are like. They may have to check some things. So they’re learning botanical nomenclature, they’re learning geography. They’re learning just the process, the basic process of science documentation. And if done right, if those students have a little freedom to do their own sort of creative projects with some of the things that they work with. This is a fabulous way to get students to use to sort of have an approach to data science even where what they’re working with is far more interesting than actuarial data or demographic data. The kinds of examples that are often used.

[00:27:50] Dennis McKenna: Right. At least there’s something physical that they can relate it to.

[00:27:53] Barbara Thiers: They can ask a question. I mean, we’ve done project with high school students which get them to kind of go through the process of determining whether a species is rare based on where it occurs and how many there are. And it’s very adaptable. It takes a little work up front to kind of decide what are the kinds of questions that are appropriate to be answered. But I would think with a little time and effort this could be touted as an educational opportunity that really couldn’t be had anywhere else.

[00:28:24] Dennis McKenna: Right. Especially because of where it is possibility to link work with the Herbarium with work in the field.

[00:28:34] Barbara Thiers: Absolutely.

[00:28:36] Dennis McKenna: And because you walk out the door of the Herbarium and you’re in the middle of the Amazon.

[00:28:43] Barbara Thiers: Yes.

[00:28:44] Dennis McKenna: I mean, you’re in the middle of Iquitos but an hour or so up the river. You may as well be.

It can get quite wild and quite remote quickly.

So in that sense so I’m trying to make people appreciate this. That the herbarium with our Biognosis Project. What that embodies is the idea that this is a place where science and folk knowledge, traditional knowledge, can come together. We want to create the herbarium as a nexus for this information exchange and make it relevant to the people in these communities because they’re immersed in a world of plants. They depend on plants for everything, medicines, foods, clothing, dye, you name it.

This is just their daily life. Other people don’t realize this. And so what we want to do with the herbarium is create a place where those elements of the plant world become apparent and then help those people also to appreciate the scientific value of their knowledge and create ways for them to share that knowledge if they choose to. Also respecting, say, you don’t have to disclose anything that you feel that your people would rather not spread to the world. But what you can disclose, this will be a mechanism to do that. And hopefully we can enlist the cooperation of different botanical gardens, museums and so on. The New York Botanical Garden. The Missouri Botanical Garden is another institution that’s Very strong in.

And, you know, I have Immense respect for Al Gentry. It’s such a pity that he tragedy passed on.

So we’re kind of wondering, how can we approach this? We’re a nonprofit. We don’t have any real institutional chops behind us.

And the question is, how can you approach people and potential funders and make them appreciate the value of what’s in this herbarium? Because if you go and look at it, it looks like kind of a mess. And it is in some ways.

You see the catalogs, the mounted specimens, but then you also see the rooms full of boxes and bags of collections that some go back 30 years or more.

[00:31:39] Barbara Thiers: Yeah, I know that very well.

[00:31:44] Dennis McKenna: And there’s no telling what shape these specimens are in. They could have all been eaten by bugs by this time.

[00:31:52] Barbara Thiers: Yeah, hopefully not.

What you’re telling me reminds me a lot back in the day of what the collection was like at the university in Bogota. They had tons and tons of backlog. What they did was train up a bunch of botanists who could identify them.

There are resources in neighbouring countries. There is quite a lot of smart young botanists who are much closer by, I would think, two things. It would be extremely attractive to many tropical botanists to go and see what’s there. So you might get people to come even on their own dime because they’d like a way in and they’d like to see what’s been collected. So that would be one way. There are also bringing in, like I say, people who’ve kind of been through this from Columbia especially because they really have upped their game in terms of care of their collections in the past 20 or 30 years.

[00:32:50] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:32:50] Barbara Thiers: Learn from that experience.

It’s of huge interest internationally, worldwide, about how to incorporate indigenous knowledge into a variety of things, whether it’s climate change, landform change over time, but also very much in terms of biodiversity.

[00:33:10] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:33:10] Barbara Thiers: And finding out how. But it’s tricky ethically. But we’re assuming we’re talking about people who are willing to share at least some aspects of their knowledge, how exactly to do that, how to structure it. And I know Missouri Botanical Garden is actually doing quite a lot of work on this. So there’s an interesting question from the point of view of not just biology, but anthropology, linguistics and so forth about recording these and actually just data science in general. So that’s another angle that it might be possible to get some interest in. I mean, to me, and maybe it’s my own bias, but the idea that this could be a way to train local students in techniques that are going to be key, it’s the people on the ground in those places that are going to have to be the ones who make the decisions about what gets conserved and what’s not. We can help all we like, but it’s their place and their decisions, their livelihoods. If the more we can do, the more we could use collections, herbarium collections, to increase their knowledge and appreciation of the local flora. That’s probably the most important thing we can do.

[00:34:23] Dennis McKenna: This fits very well with the objectives of our project, in addition to documenting the specimens, we want to make a series of documentaries, kind of a snapshot of the current state of traditional medicine in the Amazon and these communities in the Loreto area that are, you know, kind of the collection area for the herbarium because they have been impacted by all the other forces that are impacting everything everywhere. Climate change is mainly climate change but then we’ve got globalisation and all the issues around indigenous intellectual property, Peru particularly. There’s also ayahuasca tourism which has had tremendous impact, some of it good, some of it not so good.

And yet these communities thrive.

Well, they continue to exist anyway.

What I try to illustrate in my presentation is every specimen tells a story. Every specimen has a story behind it. At least somebody somewhere felt that it was important to collect that specimen and document it.

Sometimes you don’t get much more than that. Sometimes, as you well know, you get deeper levels of information. So we want to bring those stories together and make those real to people and then people can relate to that. And that’s where this gentleman that is the curator of the herbarium becomes so important because this guy he grew up in Iquitos he’s been a botanist for most of his life but he also has been very much out in the field. He knows the people. I wouldn’t call him a medicine man per se as we think of a curandero or something. He probably has more knowledge in his head than most medicine men do because he’s got the science.

[00:36:35] Barbara Thiers: Sure.

[00:36:35] Dennis McKenna: He’s got the science, he´s got 1 foot in science, 1 foot in traditional medicine. He’s one of these people about whom it said when a medicine man dies it’s as though a library is burned out. He is the library and he never writes anything down. He does not think this way. So one thing that we want to do in making these documentaries is just do these in depth interviews with Juan about in the field, in the herbarium, talking about the plants that he feels are interesting to him and talk about stories of botanists.

He can select a specimen out of the herbarium and he’ll tell you not only what it is and maybe what it’s used for and so on but usually has a story or two about some botanist 20 years ago that came through and it’s often very funny.

[00:37:32] Barbara Thiers: Some stupid gringo who came and what they did.

[00:37:35] Dennis McKenna: So we want to make that real. We want to document Juan´s knowledge through videography eventually maybe produce a book, but maybe not. I mean, there is the Amazonian Ethnobotanical Dictionary, which you’re probably familiar with. It’s long been out of print. There needs to be an update version of that. It’s one of the most valuable books in my library. But my copy is well over 30 years old, maybe 40 years old by now.

[00:38:11] Barbara Thiers: Yeah, well, it’s clearly a treasure on many different levels.

The story is just getting the message out there because there’s no question. And I do think I think the South American in general botanical community would be happy to be helpful. There is the Latin American Botanical Congress. There used to be several networks of Latin American herbaria, people who’ve been doing this for many years and who may have gone through the very same kind of struggles, both for appreciation and for what’s needed to actually do the updating. So there is a great community. I’ve been very impressed. Years ago, we used to have meetings of Latin American herbaria. The Mellon Foundation was funding the digitisation of specimens, and they were very generous, and they brought people together, and one day they just gave everybody who wanted to the chance to get up and talk about their herbarium, all Latin American curators. And it was the most inspiring day I’ve ever spent because they’re all facing challenges.

[00:39:23] Dennis McKenna: Were any of those lectures recorded?

[00:39:26] Barbara Thiers: No, we didn’t have the foresight to.

[00:39:28] Dennis McKenna: Didn’t think about that.

[00:39:30] Barbara Thiers: We didn’t do that. But everybody making do with what they.

[00:39:35] Dennis McKenna: In terms of funding. As we’ve tried to secure funding for this, we’ve been focusing on basically private individuals who, for one reason or another, often there’s the psychedelic angle, and people want to fund things related to that. So then when you step back from that and say, well, this is sort of not really about psychedelics, this is about plants in general.

But I wonder, should we our efforts to get the enthusiasm of private philanthropists have not turned out to be so good. We haven’t gotten the response. And I’m wondering, should we be focusing on forming alliances or partnerships with some of these other institutions, looking at different grant sources and so and the thing is, for the McKenna Academy as a small nonprofit, we don’t have the cachet, we don’t have the track record, you know, the New York Botanical Garden, the Missouri Botanical Garden has, these established institutions that have probably a pool of people that want to continuously support them. We’d like to get to that place, but I’m not sure how you do that.

[00:40:59] Barbara Thiers: Have you had a conversation with Peter Raven about this?

[00:41:03] Dennis McKenna: At the New York Botanical?

[00:41:04] Barbara Thiers: No. Peter Raven is the former head of the Missouri Botanical Garden, and he stepped down now, it’s at least ten years ago, but he is somebody who generally knows how to figure out, knows how to connect people, and he’s passionate about projects like the one you’re talking about.

[00:41:23] Dennis McKenna: I think I need to be talking.

[00:41:26] Barbara Thiers: I will make sure you get his contact. I’ll introduce you.

[00:41:28] Dennis McKenna: I would love to talk with because I think this is what we need. We need to get some institutional alliances, and then we need to get enough funding to effectively not so much do the project, but write the proposals, which will be complicated and expensive to produce, and make a very detailed map of where we want to go and then present that, excite enthusiasm for people that want it.

[00:42:02] Barbara Thiers: So Peter would have been the one who raised the money for Al Gentry to do a lot of the work that he did. He was Al Gendry’s boss.

[00:42:11] Dennis McKenna: The Missouri Botanical Garden has a close relationship to the one in Iquitos I mean, they sort of took it under its wing back in the late 80s, early 90s. They even built a new building for it.

They tremendously upgraded it. Then when Al Gentry died, it sort of fell away because he was there. He was constantly pushing for it.

[00:42:37] Barbara Thiers: Right.

[00:42:37] Dennis McKenna: And it sort of just withered once he was gone and they still have the building and so on, the infrastructure. But to mount these additional 100,000 specimens, it’s going to probably have to build a new building or add a couple of floors to the existing one, which is where some of this $10 million will come from. I don’t know if that’s what it’s going to take.

[00:43:05] Barbara Thiers: Well, as I say, I’ve always been a big fan of the pilot project. If they can identify a small piece and try to generate some interest and show some real benefits to the students, obviously to the collections before and after, what they look like in the newspaper and how nice they look, how they are contributing to gaps in the knowledge.

But again, it will take a little effort to figure out where to start and what to start with. You have to be very strategic. I wouldn’t pick a random bundle of plants to work on. I’d see if they know if they have specimens by Al Gentry or by somebody else that they know were collections that were made to fill a particular taxonomic or geographic gap and just start small and then see if you can generate some larger interest from that. So that would be one suggestion.

You might interest a foundation or an individual in a pilot project, which, with the possibility of scaling up once data are captured, they could be shared internationally through the Global Biodiversity Institute if they were interested. There are all sorts of ways that these data, once the plants are mounted and you put the information in a database, that suddenly these are part of what the world can…

[00:44:30] Dennis McKenna: Becomes part of the body of knowledge that’s accessible to the world.

That’s what we want to do with the herbarium in Iquitos is make it part of that information pool rather than something off to the side here that nobody’s heard of and nobody really cares about because it’s so important, just because of the place and see it.

[00:44:56] Barbara Thiers: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I actually think there would be a lot of people interested to help, maybe an article and think about where you might reach, because I think if most people are like me, they knew there was a herbarium there. They knew it was an important herbarium. They haven’t heard anything about it in a while. It’s kind of fallen out of their thinking. But the herbarium community internationally is very supportive and close knit and if there’s a herbarium in trouble, people will try to find a way to could be.

[00:45:31] Dennis McKenna: Maybe a good idea would be to have like a two or three day symposium on this and it could be virtual or otherwise. Bring some curators in. Bring people like yourself and Peter Raven and other people that have worked in neotropical botany and try to make this real for people. What we’re finding is in this climate particularly, it’s just hard to raise money for nonprofits.

[00:46:05] Barbara Thiers: Oh, believe me.

It’s one reason I retired, quite frankly. I was tired of raising money.

So I totally understand.

[00:46:17] Dennis McKenna: Right, but you succeeded. You created this CV Star herbarium, which is one of the top virtual herbarium, if not the top virtual herbarium in the world.

[00:46:32] Barbara Thiers: It’s all by luck. And by happenstance, though, I mean really.

[00:46:36] Dennis McKenna: Well, luck and happenstance. But then you had the vision that guided this thing. I mean, I know you had many collaborators and so on.

[00:46:45] Barbara Thiers: Yeah, I’m a big fan of having a vision. And the more that can be articulated about exactly what deliverables will come from this, I think we all know. But to the larger audience of funders, they don’t necessarily know. There is a sense among people, people in funding, that putting money into something like this is sort of a bottomless pit.

And I mean, I’ve heard donors have told me, yeah, I’ll give you a million and then two years later you’re going to want another million when’s it going to be done? And of course, there is really no answer to that question.

[00:47:22] Dennis McKenna: The fact is, they’re right.

[00:47:27] Barbara Thiers: It is. And those conversations made me very uncomfortable.

[00:47:30] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:47:30] Barbara Thiers: But we’re building something that is meant to last forever. Forever and ever and ever. And every collection, whether you like to say this or not, every collection you add is going to add some work that is going to have to be maintained in perpetuity. But again, there should be clear cut deliverables and clear cut goals, short term goals. And we have to just recognise that what we see as the questions the herbarium can answer today may change in a number of years. And then we may be asking different questions. We may be using a lot of AI, we may be doing very different things, but it’s indisputable that having actual biological material from the past that’s being maintained and preserved is an irreplaceable resource. So even though the questions may change, we know it will be…

[00:48:24] Dennis McKenna: The questions may change, but the resource will be there to support those questions. Well, this is a very interesting conversation because like, as you say, the philanthropists will say, well, you want a million dollars next year, you’ll want another million. When will it be done?

[00:48:42] Barbara Thiers: Right.

[00:48:43] Dennis McKenna: This is not a building that you’re making. This is not a statue. You’re supporting a process.

So the answer is it really doesn’t come to an end because it’s an active institution that’s doing things. And it needs ongoing support, but it also has ways to generate its own revenues. Once you get to a certain stage, then you can generate revenues through, like, partnerships with educational institutions, botanical gardens and so on to create educational programs that brings this stuff to the world.

It’s such a tougher cell than, say, dinosaur, something like that.

[00:49:31] Barbara Thiers: It absolutely is.

[00:49:33] Dennis McKenna: But it’s important. I mean, dinosaurs are gone, right?

Plants are here.

[00:49:39] Barbara Thiers: Kind of ironic. We could still save some of the plants, the dinosaurs. There’s no hope, but people are interested in that. But there’s no end to knowledge. There’s no end to what we can learn from these things. But there are short term spinoffs of things like you say that will help us in very material ways. And there’s nothing more pressing right now than climate change in a place like Iquitos.

[00:50:07] Dennis McKenna: It’s a laboratory to study this.

[00:50:09] Barbara Thiers: Exactly. And the interactions and herbaria are the basis for conservation decisions and conservation science in many ways. There’s still a lot to explore about exactly how we turn knowledge into conservation action. Iquitos could be a center for how to do this, how to turn this knowledge into actions that will actually conserve part of the forest where there’s nowhere more critical to do it than where they are.

[00:50:37] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:50:38] Barbara Thiers: So there’s huge opportunities.

As you say. It all begins with getting these plants out of storage and into cabinets so they can be studied.

[00:50:47] Dennis McKenna: That’s going to be a long term project. But your idea of a pilot project is excellent. I’m not sure how, but this idea of taking a subset of the collection and saying, for example, Al Gentry’s collection, you could structure it that way, or you could look at a particular family or all the ways you could look at it, maybe carve off.

I mean, this might fit in with our preoccupation with psychoactive drugs because you could do a survey.

We do these conferences, the ESPD conferences, the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.

[00:51:29] Barbara Thiers: There you go.

[00:51:30] Dennis McKenna: We could build a project based on that idea.

I had a grant some years ago, in the early 90s from the Stanley Medical Research Institute to look at plants with potential to treat dementia and schizophrenia and these sorts of things. And so we made some collections. We had a database, we had all that. But that concept could be expanded, and that could be very interesting way to approach it. And then you might even get money from pharmaceutical industry, but then you have to be careful of all the cooperation and intellectual property issues. But the National Cancer Institute has managed, you know, they’ve walked a fine line for many years, and they managed to respect indigenous property rights and also advance investigation. So it can be done. It can be done.

You retired?

[00:52:35] Barbara Thiers: I did.

[00:52:37] Dennis McKenna: What led to that? It sounds like you were doing all these exciting things. You didn’t just drop everything one day and move to Denver.

[00:52:45] Barbara Thiers: The period between 2010 and 2020 was sort of a golden period for herbaria. The National Science Foundation was putting $100 million into the digitisation of natural history collections in the United States, something I never in a million years dreamed would happen. But I was able to play a part in helping to set up that program, help give NSF some guidance on how it might be structured and how it might operate. And then I was able to leverage that to raise quite a lot of money for the garden to do that. And that program ended in 2020. And of course, there’s tons more digitisation to do, not just at New York, but everywhere. But we’re sort of moving into a next phase of using those data and using those data using artificial intelligence and machine learning and a whole host of new techniques which are really kind of beyond me. They’re fascinating to me. I didn’t feel I should be the one to be leading this next generation. I was able to leverage my skills to get the stuff digitised, but I thought it was time very conscious of making opportunities for up and coming people. So I thought this is a great place for a new set of folks to step in. Also, I was trained as a botanist. I loved my little liverworts and I always wanted to get back to doing started. I learned them in California and I wasn’t so interested in going back to California, but I wanted to get back to the west. And my daughter happens to live in Denver. My daughter and her husband and I’ve had a long term association with this institution with the Denver Botanic garden, which is a fine example of not just living plants and not just the preserved plants. But of a whole approach to informing people about plants and their importance and helping them to grow gardens that are appropriate for this area and to learn about plants. So it was an institution I was very happy to be associated with.

[00:54:52] Dennis McKenna: What do you do here?

[00:54:53] Barbara Thiers: My first goal, I particularly would like to do a Bryophyte Flora of Colorado. One has been done in a kind of a first attempt way about ten years ago. I would like to redo that. But what I’m setting up now is sort of a new concept for herbarium. It’s going to be a public access reference collection for Bryophytes so that the general public can come in with their specimens and they can compare them. We’ll make space available for people to do this study because a lot of the different land management agencies and parks and public lands are keen to know more about that aspect. But they don’t know them and they’re not easy to learn. So creating a reference set of specimens is one step towards unlocking the door for people discovering these organisms.

But I’m also having a lot of fun going out and collecting them and identifying them, and it’s how I got into this, and I’ve kind of returned to my roots. And I’m still very much involved in the collections community and in the biodiversity data of I’m on the advisory board of the biodiversity collections network. And we are trying to engage with a whole host of data scientists and environmental data to try how we can integrate all the data that we have to answer these very pressing challenges that we face. So I didn’t want to leave that. I was a little tired of the day to day grind of raising money.

[00:56:24] Dennis McKenna: You do after a while.

[00:56:27] Barbara Thiers: But I’m still passionately a supporter of the New York Botanical Garden.

[00:56:31] Dennis McKenna: You have a chance to pursue your own study of bryophytes.

[00:56:34] Barbara Thiers: Yes, that’s what I do here.

[00:56:37] Dennis McKenna: I was very surprised, actually, one of my best friends from graduate school days, a guy named Terry McIntosh, I was very surprised to learn that Richard Spruce was actually a biologist. And he of course, he’s famous in the world of psychedelics because he’s one of the first people that ever wrote about ayahuasca or reported on those plants.

I had no idea he was a bryologist.

[00:57:08] Barbara Thiers: That’s how I came to Richards. This is beautiful.

[00:57:14] Dennis McKenna: That’s very interesting, but you’ve produced much food for thought here in terms of how to approach it.

You talked a few minutes ago about how the next generation this is part of our vision, too. We have this idea of bringing once we get a subset or the whole set, whatever their funds for, not just digitise the specimens and put them online, but then we have this idea for what we’re calling the Visionary Rainforest.

Which is basically the idea to bring the cutting edge VR and AI technologies to use these specimens to create an immersive environment. The metaverse, I hate that word, but in some kind of visual space that you can actually fly through it with the collections distributed either based on geography or they could be collection date or probably geography. And then so you’ve got these collections, and then it becomes much more interactive and almost like a game almost, to fly through this environment. No, these collections are this space is dotted with nodes, and each node is a specimen. And you click the specimen and all the data and then all the other databases that might be associated with it genomic, taxonomic, phytochemical, and botanical.

[00:58:54] Barbara Thiers: Yeah.

[00:58:55] Dennis McKenna: Make it real.

We have this vision. I think well, what you’ve given me is a lot of takeaways, actually.

I so appreciate that, but I think the main takeaway for me, as I think about how we try and fund this is maybe that’s what we should be doing is select a subset of the herbarium that, for whatever reason, is of interest to people, say, psychoactive. There’s a broad category. There’s all kinds of sure. And then try and digitise that subset and then create this virtual environment based on that, that becomes a demo, and then people can appreciate that, and the experience will lead people to want to fund it.

The challenge, I think, with an herbarium is if you’re outside the field, you’re prone to this idea of who cares about a bunch of dead plants?

But dead plants are I mean, science is basically the botany. The botany is basically the science of dead plants.

[01:00:08] Barbara Thiers: But I remain convinced that if you can get a little bit of someone’s attention and you have got the right specimens and you tell a good story, you will get them interested. They are inherently interesting, but they need a little interpretation.

I’ve given thousands of tours over the past 40 years, and I have rarely, almost never had not been able to get some glimmer of interest, even from middle school students.

It takes a little showmanship and a little effort to get the story and get a succinct story that anybody can follow, but I think it can be done.

[01:00:55] Dennis McKenna: Does the Denver Botanical Garden have an herbarium?

[01:00:59] Barbara Thiers: They do.

[01:01:00] Dennis McKenna: Of course they do.

[01:01:00] Barbara Thiers: They do. They have a herbarium that’s focused mostly on Colorado. They have a herbarium of plants, and they have a herbarium of fungi, both of which are excellent, especially the fungi. I think there’s certainly nothing comes close to documenting the fungi of the central Rocky Mountain region like this herbarium does. Begun by a physician who was a hobbyist and in his spare time began to work but made excellent collections, wrote a number of books and was a recognised authority. And the flowering plant herbarium, again started by a woman who was not trained in the field but had an excellent eye and dedication. Kathryn Kalmbach and today, this herbarium is the basis for the floor of Colorado, which is produced by the curator Jen Ackerfield, which is used by essentially everyone who has a need to identify plants in Colorado, which turns out is quite a few.

[01:01:55] Dennis McKenna: Quite a few, more than you might think.

[01:01:57] Barbara Thiers: Right. Everyone from rangers to ranchers to school kids to know there’s a huge interest in it.

It’s a herbarium that and it also has a huge training component for students and interns, short term and long term employees. In my mind, it’s a small herbarium compared to what I worked in, but it does all of the things a herbarium should do in terms of serving the public, serving science, teaching the next generation.

[01:02:27] Dennis McKenna: So maybe that’s a model for this herbarium and Iquitos. Yeah.

Well, very interesting. I think there must be more questions, but I really appreciate your time, and I would like to respectfully ask if you will be an advisor to our project.

[01:02:49] Barbara Thiers: It’d be my pleasure.

[01:02:51] Dennis McKenna: if you would be able to, we would really appreciate that. We need guidance.

I am a botanist, but sort of not.

I’m an ethnopharmacologist, whatever that means. But for this project, I think it would be immensely helpful to be able to say we have Dr. Barbara Thiers. And who is Barbara Thiers? Well, here’s who she is, whatever that’s worth.

[01:03:22] Dennis McKenna: For those that know the field, I think you’re well known and well respected.

[01:03:28] Barbara Thiers: There’s nothing that I’m more committed to than helping herbaria, and it would be my great pleasure to help.

[01:03:34] Dennis McKenna: Thank you. Thank you.

We are going to put well, I’m inspired. I’m going to present on this project at this, there are people in the audience who easily could write a check for the whole thing. I am not expecting that, but I would be delighted to be surprised.

[01:03:57] Barbara Thiers: Well, if they could support just a 10th of it, it would be enough to get started.

[01:04:02] Dennis McKenna: Just maybe a pilot project is the way we should be framing this. Instead of $10 million, maybe a million dollars, that’s a more achievable goal.

[01:04:13] Barbara Thiers: A lot with a million dollars with this.

There could be some real significant outcomes from that.

[01:04:21] Dennis McKenna: Yeah.

[01:04:24] Barbara Thiers: Good.

[01:04:25] Dennis McKenna: Well, thank you. Thank you so much for your time.

[01:04:28] Barbara Thiers: I enjoyed it.

[01:04:29] Dennis McKenna: I enjoyed it very much too. I’m so happy you’re here and still very active. So on you’re too busy to go to psychedelic science. That’s probably not your…

[01:04:43] Barbara Thiers: I don’t have much to contribute there, but I’m glad that it’s going.

[01:04:49] Dennis McKenna: It’s the biggest conference on the topic ever. There are 11,000 people.

[01:04:54] Barbara Thiers: That’s just staggering.

[01:04:57] Dennis McKenna: It is.

Well, I guess it’s good.

There’s a lot of interest in all this, and I’m one of the older generations, so I’m iconic, but I’m not contributing much to it anymore. And my interests actually are more along the lines of this kind of thing.

I think that trying to really, basically bridge these areas of knowledge is the most important thing to preserve the knowledge, the biodiversity, the habitats. I don’t have to tell you all the things that this relates to.

So thank you very much.

[01:05:43] Barbara Thiers: My pleasure.

Thank you for listening to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna. Find us online at mcKenna.academy.