The Texas A&M Biology Department Herbarium is located in the basement (room 9) of beautiful Butler Hall on the main campus of Texas A&M University. Our specimens are housed in a Elecompac compactor unit that was installed in 1978. The compactor design allows storage of the maximum number of plant specimens using minimum space because the unit opens sequentally to expose a range of specimen storage boxes.
	Specimens are arranged by major taxonomic group (Pteridophytes, Gymnosperms, Monocots, and Dicots) within four of the six compactor ranges. Most of our specimens represent flowering plant taxa from Brazos and adjacent counties. This compactor range houses a portion of our dicot specimens. Families are arranged alphabetically, as are genera.
	Another range carries unmounted, unaccessioned specimens that serve as documention for faculty/staff/student research. The range depicted here carries Chenopodium specimens from throughout the world. Most of these were grown in the departmental greenhouse from field-collected germplasm. The herbarium also maintains a Chenopodium germplasm collections that exceeds 1,000 accessions, mostly from the Americas.
	This area also carries an extensive sample of diversity in the genus Cucurbita (squashes, pumpkins, and gourds), a genus that has received considerable research attention from faculty and students associated with the herbarium. We also maintain a large Cucurbita germplasm and fruit collection under special temperature/humidity conditions in a nearby (rm. 005) seed storage facility
	Processing procedures must consider the fact the dried plant specimens have a very long shelf life. The plant material, if kept dry and free of insect pests, can last for hundreds of years. Thus, care is taken to insure that other components of the finished specimen - paper, ink, and glue - are of archival quality. Dried plants and labels are simply glued to high quality, herbarium-grade paper and allowed to dry in movable racks. Once dry, they are ready to accession, computerize, and file in the compactor unit.
	The herbarium computer -  Our specimen database  is maintained on this machine. Images are processed here for our gallery.

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