Remember back in August when we shared a profile of C.J. Hibbard, photographer for the Department of Botany? Through the use of a ledger titled “Receipts and Disbursements of the Geological and Natural History Survey Funds from August 1, 1872…
I was entering caption information for the botanical photographs in the Department of Botany collection. This involved matching the digital reference image on my computer screen to the physical mounted photograph on my desk, deciphering the hand-written plant identification scrawled…
While faculty from the Department of Botany explored the state to identify plant life in the early 1900s, department photographer C.J. Hibbard not only provided photographic documentation of their observations, but also took the opportunity to explore a bit of…
We reached a milestone on the Exploring project this week – completion of metadata entry (to include scientific names, families, additional captions, and geographical locations) for the 2,273 mounted botanical photographs from the Department of Botany records. Now ends the…
While growing up, I had several editions of Where’s Waldo? on my bookshelf. First published in England in 1987 as Where’s Wally? (Waldo is the American version), each book includes a series of highly detailed illustrations by British artist Martin…
For the Friday feature this week, why don’t we focus on a specific genus of fungi? It’s Friday the 13th, a day of superstition and fear of weird occurrences. The best that I can do in that department is to…
Last summer I made a resolution to explore Minnesota by visiting destinations in my home state that I have not yet experienced. I started with an excursion to Ely and the Sudan mine last August, and just this past…
This University of Minnesota botanist is intensely dedicated to his study of Minnesota flora… – Rock vegetation, lichens, and mosses on sand bluff, Minnehaha, July, 1902 (From the photograph collection of the Department of Botany)…
When the Exploring project began back in mid-April, the inaugural collection of materials scanned were 2,200 botanical photographs from the collection of the Department of Botany (precursor to the Department of Plant Sciences). The final scan of this collection was…
Within the past few days, I have seen multiple reports of the demise of the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) – the official State Butterfly of Minnesota. Multiple local media sources have reported recently that extreme weather conditions in the south…