The team

Curator: Matt Buys

orcid.org/0000-0002-1701-6370

Assistant Curator: Elizabeth Miller

Herbarium technician: Wendy Hurren

Honorary Associate: John Hobbs

Loans & Visitors

Loans
The National Forestry Herbarium participates in a loan programme with herbaria listed in Index Herbariorum. Specimens are loaned for the purpose of taxonomic research. Those wishing to loan specimens from the National Forestry Herbarium must abide by the herbarium's loan conditions. Researchers are encouraged to make use of our online loan system.

Visitors
The National Forestry Herbarium is a PC 1 Containment Facility and therefore not open to the public. Access for bona fide researchers or for educational purposes is by prior arrangement with the curator only.

Hours
9am to 4:30pm Monday-Friday, closed on public holidays.

Information services

The National Forestry Herbarium provides a range of information services to the forestry community, researchers and the public. These services include:

• Identification of tree species that occur in New Zealand, especially eucalypts and conifers.
• Provision of botanical information from the herbarium database.
• Permanent storage and databasing of voucher specimens for forest biodiversity studies.
• Identification of native and exotic plants from the Bay of Plenty.

Plant identifications
The better the samples we receive, the better we can identify a plant. Good samples usually imply fertile material (i.e. more than just branches and leaves) possessing reproductive parts like cones or flowers and fruits/capsules. If you wish to have a tree identified, it is recommended that you provide us with material that contains:

• A shoot at least 20 cm long with attached leaves.
• Cones or flowers and fruit, including seeds.
• A small sample of bark.
• A description of the tree in terms of shape and height.
• Photographs of the tree, especially the bark.

Eucalypts and Pines can be particularly challenging to identify and the following set of characters will assist greatly:

Plant identifications cost $65 (includng GST) per specimen. Send plant material sealed in a bag with your contact details either via mail to:
Herbarium Curator, National Forestry Herbarium, Scion, Private Bag 3020, Rotorua 3046, New Zealand

or via courier to:
Herbarium Curator, National Forestry Herbarium, Scion, 49 Sala Street, Rotorua, New Zealand

Bay of Plenty Plants

Introduction

The National Forestry Herbarium, situated in the heartland of the Bay of Plenty (BOP) region, also fulfils a role in servicing public agencies, private companies and individuals in terms of documenting and identifying the regional flora. The National Forestry Herbarium has embarked upon a project entitled "Bay of Plenty Plants (BoPP)" with the ultimate aim of compiling a conspectus for the region.

Geographic extent

For the purposes of BoPP, we follow Beadel et al. (2010) and define the Bay of Plenty based on the boundaries of 16 Ecological Districts (ED), namely: Te Aroha, Mayor Island, Motiti, Tauranga, Otanewainuku, Rotorua Lakes, White Island, Te Teko, Taneatua, Opotiki, Kaingaroa, Whirinaki, Ikawhenua, Waimana, Waioeka and Motu.

Essentially, the BOP borders take on the form of an inverted triangle. The region stretches from the southern reaches of the Coromandel Peninsula in the North West to Cape Runaway in the North East and is home to about 260 km of open coastline and incorporates several large islands. Flanked by the Kaimai-Mamaku ranges to the west, and the Raukumara and Huiarau Ranges to the east, the BOP region extends some 140 km south towards the interior as far as the Kaimanawa Range.

Current Checklist

Checklists are by their nature out-dated as soon as they have been printed, whereas online checklist incorporate nomenclatural and taxonomic changes as soon as they have been entered into a database. Consult the NZFRI database and filter for BOP in the LOCALITY field for the latest version of the checklist. Ecological Districts are currently recorded in the HABITAT field.

Under-collected areas

As pointed out by Buys (2012), although plant lists have been a popular way of documenting the occurrence of species in the BOP, they represent unvouchered observations and can therefore not be verified. When it comes to vouchered specimens, large tracts of the BOP remain under represented in NZFRI and we aim to address this over the next couple of years by targetting unvouchered species reported as observations in species lists in the BOP. Collection wishlists for each ED have been compiled by comparing existing vouchers in the NZFRI collection with the lists in Beadel et al. (2010).

Collection wishlists per Ecological District in the BOP

How you can help

Vouchering species per ED in the BOP is a large undertaking and we encourage anyone interested in assisting in filling the gaps in our BoPP collection to contact us. Apart from the wishlists above, we offer on our Utilities page Google Earth KMZ files for the Ecological District boundaries, pro forma blank field note templates and BRAHMS template files to assist any collecting effort.

Selected BoPP references

Adams, J. 1885. On the botany of Te Aroha Mountain. Transactions of New Zealand Institute 17: 275-287.

Allan, H.H. & Dalrymple, K.W. 1925. Ferns and flowering plants of Mayor Island, N.Z. Transactions of the New Zealand Institute 56: 34-36.

Atkinson, I. & Percy, C. 1956. An account of the vegetation of Mayor Island. Tane 7: 29-34.

Beadel, S., Ecroyd, C., de Lange, P., Cashmore, P., Shaw, W. & Crump, S. 2009. Checklist of indigenous and naturalised vascular plants in the Bay of Plenty . Rotorua Botanical Society, Rotorua.

Buys, M.H. 2012. Under-collected areas in the Bay of Plenty. Rotorua Botanical Society Newsletter 59: 23-34.

Clarkson, B.D.S., Smale, M.C. & Ecroyd, C.E. 1991. Botany of Rotorua . Forest Research Institute, Rotorua.

Ecroyd, C.E.; Clarkson, B.D. & Wilcox, M.D. 1990. An annotated list of vascular plants in the Rotorua Lakes Ecological District. Rotorua Botanical Society Special Issue No. 1: 1-69.

Heginbotham, M. & Esler, A.E. 1985. Wild vascular plants of the Opotiki-East Cape region, North Island, New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Botany 23: 379-406.

Oliver, W.R.B. 1915. The vegetation of White Island, New Zealand. Journal of the Linnaean Society of London, Botany 43:  41-44.

Identification keys

Interactive keys

World		Key Description
The Families of Flowering Plants		Families of flowering plants. Watson & Dallwitz (1992 onwards).
Gymnosperm families		Gymnosperm families. Watson & Dallwitz (2008 onwards)
Grassbase		Kew. GrassBase - The Online World Grass Flora. Clayton et al. (2006 onwards).
Genera of Lamiaceae		Kew. Interactive key to the genera of Lamiaceae (Davies, Bramley & Kirkup).
New Zealand
Cortaderia		SCION. Species of Cortaderia.
Paulownia		SCION. Species of Paulownia.
Pinus		SCION. Cultivated Pines of New Zealand.
Interactive keys to plants		Landcare. Intercative keys to: Coprosma, Grasses of NZ, Native orchids, Flowering plant Genera, Weed species of NZ, amongst others.
New Zealand Myrtaceae		Landcare, Scion et al. Interactive key to the most common indigenous and non-indigenous species of Myrtaceae in New Zealand..

To use a DELTA key, you need INTKEY pre-installed on your pc. Click here to install the latest version of INTKEY and once installed, start the key.

NZFRI Database

The National Forestry Herbarium is fully databased, but not all collections have been georeferenced or imaged. All new accessions since 2012 have been georeferenced and imaged. We are georeferencing and imaging older collections while prioritising online loan requests.

Use Explore for full text, map and image searching — or quick search by one of the fields below.

Note: The online database currently works best on pc's without touch screens.