Florida Native Plant Society Monthly Meeting and Public Program

The Archive of Life on Earth: Academic Libraries as a Repository for Natural History Collections

Speaker: Christopher Kiahtipes, Associate Curator, Florida Environment and Natural History Special Collections

Herbaria are globally significant collections with numerous potential applications spanning the biological sciences, Earth sciences, and social sciences. However, universities — constrained by space and budgets — have found themselves disinvesting in these collections over the last decades. In many cases, these collections are re-housed in major national collections such as the herbarium at the Missouri Botanical Gardens or international institutions such as Kew Gardens. Some collections have disappeared entirely. 

Motivated by the belief that a well-maintained herbarium of regional and global plants can be a crucial resource for student and faculty research, the University of South Florida Libraries embarked on a collaborative mission with our College of Arts & Sciences to integrate the USF Herbarium into the library’s Special Collections unit. 

Dr. Kiahtipes will describe the essential functions of an herbarium and outline the history of the USF Herbarium.  After this, he will address the contents of this collection in greater detail, identify the rationale for positioning this collection within the library, and explain the benefits for student and faculty research.


About our Speaker

As Associate Curator of the Natural History collections at the University of South Florida Library, Christopher A. Kiahtipes works to develop archival and collections-based sources of data on environmental responses to climate change and conservation policy.

Coming from the high deserts of the western USA, Dr. Kiahtipes has training in environmental archaeology and palaeoecology. His research uses plant microfossils to assess vegetation responses to changes in climate, regional hydrology, and human land-use decisions with the overarching goal of integrating cultural and environmental histories. 

His doctoral research reconstructed vegetation changes in the Central African Republic from the Iron Age until present. His postdoctoral work focused on developing a network of pollen records from inner Congo Basin peatlands proximal to known archaeological sites.


Logistics:  Join us at the South Brooksville Community Center, 601 E Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Brooksville, FL 34601. Come at 6:30 pm for 6:30 PM for snacks and mingling – the formal meeting and program starts at 7:00 pm. Contact us at [email protected].