FACILITIES

Biosystematics and Biodiversity Center

Established by a grant from the National Science Foundation, with matching funds from the university and the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, the center provides cutting edge technical capabilities for research in systematic biology and fosters increased scholarly interaction among faculty and students. Although the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences operates the center, principal investigators include faculty members from the Biology and Entomology departments. Occupying almost 1,500 square feet in the old Herman Heep Building, the center houses three flow cytometers, including a Coulter Elite flow cytometer and cell sorter; a digital imaging system for computer enhanced karyotyping; and an image analysis system for morphometry of structures ranging from subcellular to exomorphological.

S. M. Tracy Herbarium

The Tracy Herbarium came into being in the early 1930's based on early collections of several individuals, including the outstanding botanist-agriculturist, S. M. Tracy, for whom the herbarium is named. Specimens in the herbarium currently total over 200,000 making it the third largest in the state, exceeded only by the herbaria of the University of Texas (Austin) and Botanical Research Institute of Texas (Fort Worth). In 1974 the Tracy Herbarium was listed as one of 105 herbaria in the U. S. designated as National Resource Collections out of a total of 1,127 U. S. herbaria. The designation was based on the importance of the large collection of grasses that resides in the herbarium..

The present inventory includes not only Texas plants, but also a sampling of plants from other parts of the world. The grass collection, possibly the finest in the state, now numbers about 70,000 sheets, including 15,000 specimens from Mexico, and Caribbean, and Central America. For the past 40 years the Tracy Herbarium has been maintained and developed as part of the Department of Rangeland Ecology and Management, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Texas A&M University. Dr. Stephan L. Hatch is Director and Dale Kruse Curator.

Texas A&M Herbarium

The Biology Department Herbarium, housing nearly 50,000 dried plant specimens, has grown 10-fold since its initiation as a departmental facility in 1975. Specimens maintained by this unit include unmounted research vouchers from around the world and mounted, accessioned, specimens that document the local flora. The main herbarium is housed in specially designed, movable plant specimen storage cases in room 009 of Butler Hall.

A smaller assemblage of specimens is maintained as a student reference collection in the nearby Plant Systematics Teaching Laboratory (Butler Hall, room 004). Aside from its basic mission of providing support for teaching and research in basic botany, the Biology Department Herbarium also supplies plant identification/information services for the Texas A&M academic community, government agencies, and the public.

The departmental herbarium facility is one of 24 Texas herbaria. These maintain a combined total of over two million plant specimens which carry detailed information relating to global plant diversity and the plants of Texas. This includes specific distribution records for all taxa (species, subspecies, and varieties) in the state flora (over 7,000), as well as habitat preference, flowering periods, frequency of occurrence, and structural variation. Herbarium specimens also represent a unique historical record of Texas biodiversity. They document collections ranging from initial botanical explorations of the early 1800's, some representing species that are now extinct, through current work on endangered and threatened elements of the state flora. Until recently, this mass of useful information has been 'buried' in herbarium cases throughout the state. Current environmental problems have generated a need for immediate access for regional biodiversity data. Thus, the 'Flora of Texas Consortium', a collaborative group of state institutions, is now moving to establish a cooperative foundation for 'harvesting' this critical information from state herbarium collections and place it, through computerization, in a position of general access; the World Wide Web (WWW) of the Internet. Texas A&M is linked to this enterprise through a collaborative bioinformatics working group which includes the Biology Department Herbarium.

Texas Cooperative Wildlife Collection

The collections within the Texas Cooperative Wildlife Collection serve as historical evidence of the distribution of wildlife in Texas, and provide valuable ecological and life history information for an array of vertebrate species. The collections are used in the research of Texas A&M faculty, graduate students, and scientists worldwide, as well as for the teaching of natural history, conservation and wildlife management, both within the university and in public schools. The TCWC primarily documents the faunal history of Texas, the United States, Central and South America, and the Gulf of Mexico. This includes over one million specimens and their associated historical documents, so as to assure their accessibility to current and future generations. Historically the TCWC has been an invaluable source of data for researchers in the fields of biodiversity, vertebrate evolution, endangered species, wildlife and fisheries conservation, and even forensic biology. This information is also made available to the public, to increase awareness of the natural history of Texas and thus enabling the citizens of Texas to make better-informed decisions affecting their natural environment. In recent years, the mission of the TCWC has expanded to include a greater focus on public access and education.