The Mission of the University of Arizona Herbarium is to cultivate expertise, provide education, preserve knowledge, and promote appreciation for plants and fungi – in a world that depends on biodiversity for a sustainable future.
In service of this Mission, our Aims are to:
- To collect, preserve, and curate physical specimens, documenting the botanical and fungal communities of our state and our region1;
- To support research by accepting responsibility for vouchers, providing digital records of collection data and images, maintaining access to physical specimens, and allowing limited destructive sampling of, e.g., DNA, pollen, or spores;
- To educate regarding all aspects of plant and fungal biodiversity, including weeds and invasive species, evolutionary relationships, range expansions and contractions, and ecological interactions;
- To provide training opportunities, professional development and experiential learning for students, staff, and volunteers in the biodiversity sciences and their applications;
- To cultivate the expertise needed to translate biodiversity science for students, researchers, land managers, consultants, agency personnel, and members of the public;
- To respond to urgent needs for accurate plant and fungal identification, for example, for Poison Control and the Veterinary Diagnostics Laboratory;
- To promote appreciation for the critical role of biodiversity in human society, including crop wild relatives, urban forests, wild land conservation, and the health of current and future agroecosystems.
1 The establishment of the Arizona Territorial Museum included the mandate for the University to collect and preserve specimens of the territorial flora; Arizona Territorial Law (p. 42, HB 53, 1893).