Herbaria of plant specimens can be used to identify plants, to certify their nomenclature, to validate scientiEc observations and many more other applications (Kew Herbarium). In order that these advantages are extended to the members of the plant family Lemnaceae, we prepared herbaria of duckweed species. A representative clone of each duckweed species was selected for this purpose. We have currently made 4 sets of these herbaria. One set has been presented to the Herbarium Hausknecht, University of Jena, another was recently presented to Prof. Dr. Marvin Edelman, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel on the grand occasion of his 80th birthday in 2019 and the other two remain in the labs of Dr. K. Sowjanya Sree at Central University of Kerala, India and that of Dr. Klaus-J. Appenroth at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany. It is very pertinent to mention here that the Landolt’s duckweed collection, Zurich, Switzerland hosts herbaria vouchers of many thousands of clones of duckweeds belonging to all species that were originally curated by Prof. Landolt himself during his career.
In the course of the preparation of our duckweed herbaria, we had to standardize several parameters and had established a standard protocol for the same. In this article we will share the protocol in detail which could be of help to anyone who would like to prepare similar herbaria for duckweed specimens.
Bog, M., Sree, K. S., Fuchs, J., Hoang, P. T. N., Schubert, I., Kuever, J., et al. (2020). A taxonomic revision of Lemna sect. Uninerves (Lemnaceae). Taxon, Doi: 10.1002/tax.12188.
Sree KS, Appenroth KJ (2020) Worldwide genetic resources of duckweed: stock collections. In: Cao, X.H., Fourounjian, P., Wang, W. (eds.), The Duckweed Genomes. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. ISBN 978-3-030-11045-1
Sree, K. S., Bog, M., and Appenroth, K. J. (2016). Taxonomy of duckweeds (Lemnaceae), potential new crop plants. Emirate J. Food Agricult. 28, 291–302.