Collecting: We continue to concentrate on vocher important collections of cultivated plants that include material used in important breeding projects, well-named cultivars and recently introduced germplasm. So far this year, we have made considerable collections from the National Arboretum. We continued to voucher significant specimens in the Lagerstroemia breeding collection, and we reviewed our living and herbarium collections of Glenn Dale azaleas and pressed 31 specimens that had never been vouchered. We also collected several significant collections of cultivated plants, including Camellia species and cultivars from the American Camellia Society, and plants cultivated at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum (Superior AZ), the USDA Desert Legume Project (DELEP) (Tucson AZ), the University of Arizona Campus Arboretum (Tucson AZ), and the National Aquarium (Baltimore MD). I also made collections related to my research, primarily North American Celtis species.
We continue to look for important living collections to voucher, especially unvouchered collections that are in danger because of the retirement of curators or other reasons. We also want to broaden our geographical representation of ornamentals; currently we're strong in eastern United States, weakest in the Rocky Mountains and the interior southwest. We're glad to have input from the committee on collections that we should consider working on.
Significant collections received: We have labelled and databased 117 Cirsium specimens vouchering research by Tracey Slotta (USDA-Fargo ND), and we have labelled the vouchers from the 2004 Republic of Georgia germplasm trip by Paul Meyer (Morris Arboretum) and Joseph Postman (USDA-Corvallis).
Type and standard collections: Volunteer Don Voss continues the arduous job of checking and confirming the status of all of our type collection (currently we have 1906 specimens that are confirmed valid types). We verified, labeled, and mounted all our backlog of cultivar Nomenclatural Standards (48 cultivars). We currently hold standards for 830 cultivars.
Databasing: We have added 1567 records to our specimen database in BGBase, about a third of these being vouchers from east Asian germplasm trips. There are currently 45,233 herbarium specimens in the database. We hope the database will be accessible via the Web in the not-too-distant future, but we have no target date for this.