Really? Seaweed in the Forestry school?
Yes, the EMMA herbarium houses a little and interesting collection of algae.
All of them were collected on 1905. In other words, they predate the destruction of the EMMA herbarium in 1936. They may have arrived later as a donation or exchange, or they may have survived the catastrophe because they were on loan or kept outside the herbarium facilities.
The collection includes a double specimen – duplicated – from the Gipuzkoan coast collected by Mr. Moya and 36 specimens from the Bescansa Herbarium, all of them from the Galician coast and collected by Fermín Bescansa Casares himself (1876-1957). If you are curious to know more about this collector, you can read something about his biography and his contribution to phycology in this article (in Spanish with an English abstract):
In addition to age and the relationship with recognized collectors, there is another characteristic of this collection to highlight. Among what we call “seaweed” there may be living beings from different kingdoms, as in the case of this collection, which houses 24 taxa of plants, 12 of chromists and 1 of bacteria (cyanobacteria).
In short, it was too complex, valuable and delicate collection to deal with without expert advice. So, we kept it as a separate collection and waited until the happy moment when the right person helped us with the taxonomy.
And the time has come!
On March 24th, 2022, the researcher Ignacio Bárbara – an expert in phycology from the Biología Costera research group (BIOCOST) from the Universidade da Coruña – contacted the EMMA herbarium to request information about the EMMA-Algae collection. Ignacio Bárbara has reviewed more than 1,000 sheets of Fermín Bescansa from the SANT herbarium and needed the algae found in the EMMA-Algae collection to complete the review of all the samples collected by this prestigious botanist. A collaboration process began then between the researcher Ignacio Bárbara, the SANT herbarium of the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and the EMMA herbarium. We sent photos of all the requested sheets and formalized an inter-herbarium loan for Ignacio Bárbara to examine under a microscope 9 specimens that could not be identified through macroscopic photographs.
As a result of his research, Ignacio Bárbara has published this article (in Spanish) in which he mentions the EMMA-Algae specimens and even includes a photo:
Bárbara I. 2023. El herbario de algas bentónicas marinas de Fermín Bescansa Casares (1874-1957).
Thanks to this fruitful collaboration, we have revised the information on the labels to complete the EMMA-Algae database. With the updated information, we have sent the data set to the Spanish node of GBIF so that it can be uploaded to the international portal and can be freely consulted.
EMMA-Algae dataset is now available in GBIF!
