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LEEDS, England – Hundreds of thousands of carefully preserved plants and flowers in the United Kingdom will be used for a comprehensive environmental project as experts try to determine how the atmosphere has changed over the decades.
The Dead Plant Society project, sponsored by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, will lead a search through the 250,000-strong collection in Leeds to compare modern plants and flowers to vegetation that has been carefully stored in the Leeds Discovery Centre for decades.
Experts hope they will be able to determine how pollution, air quality and changes to the climate have changed over generations.
“It will also help us build a better understanding of important issues like climate change and local biodiversity and how they have affected the city,” Clare Brown, a curator at Leeds’ museums and galleries, said in a statement. “Connecting this amazing collection with people living in the places where these beautiful plants once grew will enable them to connect with their local history, including discovering the different ways people in east Leeds may have used these plants in the past for everything from food to medicine.”
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Leeds is located approximately 200 miles north of London, and like many subtropical climate zones in the Northern Hemisphere, it has experienced rising temperatures and shifting growing seasons.
Warmer weather in these regions has been found to not only extend the growing season but also to increase the risks associated with diseases and droughts.
Experts say the project findings are expected to offer insights into the environmental changes that have shaped the region.
The tradition of saving remnants of plants dates back hundreds of years through the use of herbarium sheets.
Plants are said to be collected, flattened and dried between sheets of paper, a process that, if properly conducted, can allow specimens to be saved for centuries.
Other extensive herbarium collections exist in the U.K.’s Royal Botanic Gardens, New York’s Botanical Garden, Chicago’s Field Museum, the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. and several facilities in Australia, including its National Herbarium and Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium.
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“The Leeds Museums and Galleries collection is filled with countless beautiful and fascinating elements of the city’s history, collected and preserved over hundreds of years,” Salma Arif, a councilor at the City of Leeds, said in a statement.
Researchers did not state when results of the studies would be published but hope to add specimens to the extensive collection during the process.