Ada Hayden Herbarium

This article first appeared in INHF's Winter 2007 magazine.

By Deb Lewis

The Ada Hayden Herbarium, located at Iowa State University, is a museum of dried and pressed plants and fungi. Containing more than 600,000 specimens, it is the largest botanical collection in Iowa.

It is also a research facility, serving as a resource for taxonomic studies (relationships of species and higher groups, and their occurrence and distribution), for identifying unknown samples and for determining ecological and other information about plants and fungi. It has become a source of materials for use in molecular studies and helps support basic research on biodiversity. The Ada Hayden Herbarium is part of a worldwide network of herbaria, participating in the loan and exchange of specimens for support of research here and around the world.

In 1988 the Herbarium was named in honor of Dr. Ada Hayden, who was its curator from 1934 to 1950. The addition of thousands of her own carefully prepared specimens and her care for the collections as a whole contributed greatly to the international prominence that the Ada Hayden Herbarium enjoys today.

Deb Lewis has been curator of the Ada Hayden Herbarium since 1984.