Jose Vera Santos
Memorial Herbarium
Herbarium collections
The Jose Vera Santos Memorial Herbarium (PUH) contains 14,648 accessions, 12,681 (86.6%) of which were collected in the Philippines. The entire Herbarium collection is comprised of 309 families, 1903 genera, and 4,485 distinct species. Angiosperms make up the majority of the collections, comprising 71% of the total specimens. Bryophytes and pteridophytes make up 12% and 11% of the collections, respectively, while only one percent of the collections are gymnosperms. Five percent of the collections have either unclear taxonomic affiliations (unresolved identification) or are lacking in data (specimens that have not been identified or those with genera or species that could not be found on any database). Out of the 309 families, Family Poaceae has the largest number of specimens at 2,759, followed by Fabaceae (690), and Asteraceae (539). The Herbarium’s namesake, Santos, specialized in grasses, and a great number of the specimens under Poaceae were collected by him.
The PUH’s earliest dated specimen collected in the Philippines is the grass Echinochloa crus-galli (Poaceae), collected by Elmer D. Merrill on April 26, 1902. As the Herbarium and its contents were destroyed during the war, the origins of 392 pre-war specimens in the PUH cannot be determined. The Herbarium also houses specimens dating from as early as the 1860s collected from overseas or acquired from exchanges with other herbaria. The rise in the number of collections in the 1940s and 1950s (Figure 2) was mostly due to the contributions of Santos and his undergraduate students, during the post-war rehabilitation of the Herbarium. From the 1970s onwards, most of the specimens added to the Herbarium were collected by Leonard Co. A sizeable backlog of specimens has yet to be processed, mounted, and given accession numbers, and this may explain why very few collections have been added from the 2000s up to the present. Santos has the most number of collections in the Herbarium with 2,320 specimens collected, followed closely by Leonard Co (2,147). Together, their collections make up roughly 30.5% of the total number of collections in the Herbarium. Once his unprocessed specimens are added to the Herbarium, Co will likely overtake Santos in the size of collections in the Herbarium.
Based on the number of collections per province, Luzon is the most well-represented island group. Metro Manila tops the list with 2,572 accessions recorded to have been collected from the area. Laguna comes in second with 2,335 specimens, a majority of which are from Mount Makiling and the UP Los Baños campus. In contrast, three provinces in Mindanao are represented by only one specimen.
There are currently 39 type specimens deposited in the PUH; the majority (28) of which are isotypes. There is one published holotype and two additional holotypes collected by Zamora that were not published before his death. The earliest type specimen in the Herbarium is an isosyntype of Aristida culionensis Pilger ex Perkins (Mez and Pilger 1904) collected by Merrill in 1902, while the most recent is an isotype of Vaccinium oscarlopezianium Co (Co and others 2002) collected by Co in 1991 from the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park in San Mariano,Isabela.
Most specimens in the Herbarium are incidental collections, with the exception of groups that were of special interest to contributors, such as grasses (Santos) and ferns (Zamora and some of Co’s early collections). The Herbarium also has an unofficial policy of not collecting replicates, especially for common, ornamental, or agricultural species.
A major overhaul of the Herbarium is currently under way. An estimated 26,000 specimens (Baja-Lapis and others 2004) are now being processed and accessioned, including some 6,000 specimens collected by Co. The addition of these specimens will allow for further analyses of the Herbarium’s collection, and consequently, of how much or how little of the Philippine flora is represented in PUH.
Figure 1. Representation of the four major plant groups in the Jose Vera Santos Memorial Herbarium based on the number of collections. While fungi and algae collections continue to be housed in the Herbarium, no accession numbers have been given for said specimens at this time.
Figure 2. The number of collections per province in the Jose Vera Santos Memorial Herbarium.