Coeur d'Alene Tribe partners with UI on open house

The University of Idaho’s Stillinger Herbarium, in partnership with the Coeur d'Alene Tribune, will host a public open house from noon to 7 p.m. Nov. 19, highlighting Idaho’s oldest and largest collection of preserved plants, as well as lichens, fungi, algae and slime molds.

The open house will feature displays on how the museum preserves herbarium specimens and the Coeur d'Alene Tribe's traditional uses of certain specimens from the collection for food, medicine, tools and pigments. Tribe members will also lead discussions beginning at 1 p.m., 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. on the traditional uses of native plants, fungi and lichens.

The herbarium, located in rooms 116 and 117a of the Mines Building on the Moscow campus, was founded in 1892 and includes more than 250,000 specimens, with an emphasis on the flora of Idaho and surrounding states. The collection is named for Charles R. Stillinger, a U of I graduate who founded the trust that supports the herbarium in 1957.

The herbarium serves as an important resource for scientists, who can examine physical specimens to understand morphology or extract DNA; for members of the public who wish to view the collection to aid in plant identification; and as a historical archive to understand which plants were found in Idaho at a given time, as well as their distribution. Digital representations of specimens may also be accessed online via the Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria.

Kai Battenberg, the herbarium's collections manager and Professor Joseph Kuhl, interim head of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Department of Plant Sciences, direct it.