Herbarium TUR Celebrates Its 100 Years

The herbarium of the University of Turku (TUR) celebrated its centenary in 2022. However, the anniversary could have been celebrated earlier because the Turku Finnish University Society bought Edvard August Vainio's (1853–1929) lichen collection (TUR-V) as a basis of the herbarium already in 1919. At the time, the university society was gathering donations to establish a new private university in Turku. The university was founded in 1920, and Hotel Phoenix on the city market square was acquired for the university. Two years later, Vainio's collection was moved from Helsinki to Turku, and the herbarium began its operations on the top floor of Phoenix. At the same time, Vainio was hired to curate the collection. The new university was exclusively Finnish speaking, in contrast to the University of Helsinki, where the administrative and main teaching language was still Swedish, for historical reasons. In the newly independent Finland, the Finnish-language university was welcomed, and plant collections began to flow as gifts to the herbarium. One of the first was Elias Lönnrot's (1802–1884) herbarium, which is of great cultural and historical value. Lönnrot gathered Kalevala, the heroic national epic of Finland and was one of the most important developers of the Finnish language in the 19th century, when, as a result of the national awakening, Finnish was actively developed to become usable as administrative and educational language. During this process, Lönnrot also created the Finnish botanical terminology, most of which is still in use. At the same time, he published the first treatment of the national flora in Finnish language. While preparing it, he had collected his herbarium, of which about 750 specimens survive and are now digitally available. In 1958, the herbarium moved to the university's new premises at the current campus area. Around the same time, Reino Alava (1915–2011), who's main research interest was the taxonomy of Apiaceae in the Middle East, was appointed curator. Alava was internationally oriented and started a large-scale exchange activity with foreign herbaria to build up the collections. At the peak in the 1970s, TUR exchanged specimens with more than 40 herbaria every year. The university was nationalized in the same decade. After Alava retired, Yrjö Mäkinen (1931–2019) became curator in the early 1980s. Mäkinen was a versatile botanist whose special interest was microfungi. He also played a decisive role in initiating aerobiological research in Finland. By the end of the decade, the premises of the herbarium had become too small, and the situation worsened in the 1990s. In 1998, the herbarium was finally able to move to its current premises, which were specially designed and newly built for herbarium operations. At the same time, the herbarium collections of Åbo Akademi (TUR-A), the Swedish-speaking university in Turku, were incorporated in TUR. A new curator, mycologist Seppo Huhtinen, started around this time and still manages the position. Currently, TUR collections include a total of more than 1,100,000 specimens. There are more than 600,000 vascular plant samples, more than 200,000 fungi, more than 100,000 mosses and lichens each, about 16,000 macrofossil samples and almost 7000 samples of algae. Administratively, TUR belongs to the Biodiversity Unit of the University of Turku, and we are active in research, teaching, and societal interaction. In our anniversary year, we wanted to present our research and other activities to the general public. The COVID-19 pandemic hindered the planning of the program, but in the end, we were able to implement public exhibitions and a lecture series without restrictions. The first public event was a BioBlitz arranged 21–22 May 2022. Altogether 53 experts, nature enthusiasts and biology students participated in observing species within the university's campus area at the centre of Turku. In the course of 24 hours we found 831 species, including, for example, an endangered bryophyte species Lewinskya striata (https://inaturalist.laji.fi/projects/bioblitz-turku-2022?tab=species). The good weather helped to attract many interested citizens to follow the activities, for example, plant identification or light trapping of moths. Next, we digitized and published Lönnrot's historical herbarium online (https://collections.utu.fi/en/herbarium-tur/elias-lonnrotin-herbaario/). Several media published the press release we sent about the event, and the very next day almost 500 people browsed Lönnrot's digital herbarium. During the summer, we arranged a public exhibition presenting the herbarium's activities at the Archipelago Sea Research Institute on Seili Island, which also belongs to the Biodiversity Unit. In recent years, the research institute has promoted science tourism, and during the exhibition the Institute had 13,350 visitors. In August, the exhibition was expanded with more items and moved to the main library of the city of Turku. The exhibition featured not only posters presenting the activities of the herbarium, but also other material related to botany, and information boards (Fig. 1). On display were, for example, corncobs collected by Alava from Mexico in the 1950s, with an information board explaining about landraces and crop diversity. The public was impressed by the largest seed in the world (Lodoicea maldivica) from our collections. Efforts were made to activate the visitors. We prepared a genome puzzle to mimic de novo assembly of plastome from sequence reads (Fig. 2). Furthermore, we had a balsa (Ochroma pyramidale) log borrowed from the Botanical Garden – also part of the Biodiversity Unit –, which especially children enjoyed lifting to show their strength. The exhibition also presented some other examples from our collections, botanical art, and the history of botany teaching. To present the educational history, we showed old botany charts, anatomical plant models and, perhaps most importantly, school herbaria (Fig. 3). Collecting one's own herbarium was a mandatory part of the Finnish school curriculum from the 19th century until 1969. After a decade-long hiatus, plant collecting returned to schools again from 2004, although nowadays schools can decide for themselves whether to collect a real herbarium or a digital one. Because of this basic educational background, botany and collecting herbarium specimens is familiar to most Finns, and many who visited the exhibition expressed in the guest book their personal memories of collecting and identifying plants. Simultaneously with the main exhibition in August, we published a virtual exhibition on the herbarium website, presenting more or less the same content as in the real exhibition (https://collections.utu.fi/en/herbarium-tur/virtuaalinayttely/). We promoted the opening of the exhibition with a press release, which focused on the role that botany played in the Second World War in Finland. During the war, Finland occupied a large part of Russian Karelia, and the political goal at that time was the annexation of these areas to Finland. In an attempt to justify the conquests on scientific grounds, botanists were sent to the occupied area to seek evidence that Eastern Karelia was botanically part of Finland and not Russia, as contested as this may seem today. Several researchers from the University of Turku participated in these botanical investigations, including one of the pioneers of Finnish colour photography, Lauri E. Kari (1901–1962). We presented some of the colour slides taken by him and botany professor Harry Waris (1893–1973) from East Karelia during the war. The events of the war are still very present in the minds of Finnish people, and the war-botanical colour images presented to the public for the first time attracted great attention. Almost 7000 visitors explored our virtual exhibition on the day the press release was published, and probably more would have done so, had not the website crashed due to traffic. Simultaneously with the exhibition we organized a series of eight public lectures at the city library. Weekly lectures were also streamed online and presented our currently active research topics. The most popular lecture was given by the herbarium's project researcher Kati Pihlaja. She told the full audience about mistletoe's (Viscum album) current situation in Finland (Fig. 4). Mistletoe has mysteriously settled in Turku in recent years, and we have followed its rapid spread with the help of active citizen science. Remaining talks presented the Flora of Turku project, the role of herbarium collections in assessing the endangerment of species, Amazon research at the University of Turku, archaeobotanical studies, research on microfungi, another fungus lecture about indoor moulds and house-rotting fungi (a really big issue in Finland), and a general introduction to the world of herbaria. Organizing the events of the jubilee year was quite an effort for our small staff, and it would not have been successful without the support received from the University Communications. All in all, we managed to reach the public's attention as we planned. Working together for the events also brought a change to the usual routines and strengthened our working community.