The Botswana College of Agriculture has established a Herbarium, housed in Block 307, Rooms 002/003. A herbarium is collections of well documented, preserved (usually dry) plant samples equipped with the name, geographical, habitat, chronological and collectors’ data. Our herbarium is still in its infancy with a database collection of just over 2,000 plant specimens— w e still have to meet the international standards of housing a minimum of 5,000 plant specimens.
The idea of having a herbarium was started at BCA about 8 years ago when t he departments of Animal Science and Production ( ASP), Crop Science and Production (CSP) and Basic Sciences ( BS) got together to set up a herbarium development committee. The implementation was revived in 2004 and the BS Department designated managers of the herbarium. Dr. P.D. Lebatha, a plant syatematist in the department, was appointed Curator of the herbarium. BCA Students no longer use classrooms for the processing and mounting of plant specimens. A work area has been established for student work in the receiving room. S taff no longer have to store plant specimens in offices as these can now be kept in the herbarium.
The BCA Herbarium serves as a teaching and research facility to ASP, CSP and BS departments. Its main objective is to p rovide free and universal access to data regarding Botswana’s biodiversity, promote scientific knowledge through research, and the advancement of plant conservation .
Plant identification service and free access to data regarding flora of Botswana is another major feature of Botswana College of Agriculture Hebarium (BCAH) for student projects, assignments, and for the community . Most of the work involves plant verification, sorting out nomenclature issues—the use invalid names is a common challenge. Another challenge is to develop a culture of deposition of voucher specimens among researchers. Vouchering is an important part of scientific research, especially with the poorly researched flora of Botswana.
It is envisaged that the herbarium will strengthen research in floristic, systematics, and evolutionary botany. Knowledge of the evolutionary history of plants is very significant to biotechnology through isolation of wild types or basal taxa for gene harvesting. We aim to have good collections of species significant to agriculture and those species of conservation concern. This could, for example, be with reference to weeds, plants poisonous to livestock, medicinal plants and indigenous crops or foods.
Mr. B. Legwatatgwata attended the Millennium Seed Bank Project Plant Species Identification course at CICE. Mr. Legwatatgwata, Mrs. L. Lekorwe, Mr. M. Rampart attended a short course in herbarium techniques and management at the University of Botswana Herbarium (UCBG). More training is envisaged in the future, and the College hopes to have a full time herbarium assistant. It is also in the process of establishing a botanical garden to cater for a living collection.
Visitors to the herbarium included amongst others Prof Youngman of UB and Mr. & Mrs. Heath from Selinda Herbarium, who gave a generous donation of plant specimens from the north-eastern parts of Botswana.
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