Removal of material from specimens in the University of Florida Herbarium must be approved by the Herbarium administration.

These destructive analysis procedures are designed to help make this an efficient process for both the collection user and herbarium staff. The Collection Manager is the general point of contact to assist you.

1. Review the FLAS Collection Use Protocols.

2. Fill out the FLAS Destructive Analysis Contract.

3. Prepare annotations as per the DA contract. See Annotation of Herbarium Specimens : Recommendations for examples. You will not be permitted to remove material if you do not have your annotations ready.

4. If you have fulfilled our collection orientation obligation, review the collection and select the specimens you would like to utilize for your research. Otherwise, skip to step 5.
Please be aware that certain sets of specimens are withdrawn from the collection for various research projects, databasing and imaging. You may want to do a preliminarily search and then consult with the Collection Manager to make sure you have all material available.

5. Make an appointment with the Collection Manager to review the material and approve removal. At the same time, email a copy of the annotation(s) in the body of the email (not as an attachment) to the Collection Manager for use in the database update (step 8, below).

6. Annotate the sheet(s) and remove the material. The sheet(s) MUST be annotated at the time material is removed.

7. Removal guidelines:

• Remove material from fragment packets, if possible.
• No more than 1 cm. sq. of leaf tissue may be removed.
• Do not damage the smallest or largest leaf or reduce the variability of the morphology of the specimen.
• Basically, the scientific value of the sheet should not be degraded.

8. Give the specimens to the Collection Manager for database updating. If you select more than 20 specimens that are not in our database, you may be expected to provide the specimen data for the database.