Plant Collecting

Plant collecting underpins all floristic work in the Canadian Arctic, including the Arctic Flora of Canada and Alaska.  Excellent primers for collecting museum quality herbarium specimens can be found online, including Plant Collecting for the Amateur, from the Royal British Columbia Museum, and the Guide to Plant Collection and Identification from Queens University. 

While these resources provide an excellent start in the basics of field collecting and pressing, we provide a few general tips for Arctic plant collecting below:

Tips for Arctic Plant Collecting

• Try to collect enough individual plants from a population so as to fill a standard 11' by 18' herbarium sheet.  Individual Arctic plants often make poor specimens on their own (Figure 1).  The exceptions to this rule are rare plant species, or extremely small populations.  Multiple plants from the same collection can be pressed in the same newsprint (Figure 2).
• Be sure to collect all parts of the plant, including the roots and shoots.
• Writing your collection number and species name on both the inside and outside of the newsprint makes processing specimens back at the lab much easier.

_{Figure 1. A full herbarium sheet (left) and a sparse one (right).}

• If collecting a silica gel sample from your specimen, be sure to tag the individual plant your silica sample comes from (Figure 3).
• Be sure to bring at least one copy of the Project Information and Instructions, and multiple copies of the Collection Record Template, into the field.

Resources

Herbarium Record Collection Book Templates (compatible with Rite in the Rain #LL8511 printer paper)

• Project information and instructions
• Collection record templates

Data Spreadsheets

• Herbarium record data spreadsheet

Resources for Identification

• Vascular Plants of the Continental Northwest Territories (Porsild and Cody, 1980).  Access through the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Tips

• Collecting Bryophytes for Lab Identification