Just a stone's throw from UW-Madison's seat of power on top of Bascom Hill is a place that melds old scientific methods with modern research that you likely have not heard of — The Wisconsin State Herbarium.

The herbarium in Birge Hall is a collection of 1.1 million dusty, dried plant specimens, taped or glued inside manila folders and tucked inside row upon row of huge, vertical metal file cabinets protected with insect traps. Boxes of overflowing specimens sit in the hallways.

Now the herbarium staff is trying to get more people interested in the vast collection housed there.

"In a past century people could go outside and name the flowers or trees," said Ken Cameron, the herbarium's director. "Now you take a kid outside and the most they can say is, 'It's a tree.' If we can get students in and get them excited, then I think we've helped to counteract bio-illiteracy."

At two large wooden desks near the herbarium's entrance senior curators Ted Cochrane and Mark Wetter hover over piles of pressed plants — filing, managing and researching.

The herbarium was established the same year as the university: 1849. Specimens are still collected and pressed much the same way they were then — flattened between newspaper, felt and cardboard and held tight with buckles. Some specimens here are even older than the herbarium, dating back as far as the 1600s.

"What I'd like people to know is that in this day and age that is so focused on medical advances and biotech and genetics and molecular work, there's still a place for the more traditional science," Cameron said. "What to one person looks like a dusty, dried sample to another person is a very important look back in time."

Rare herbarium

Herbaria are becoming more of a rarity. And the UW-Madison has the third largest collection of any public university in the country, behind the universities of California and Michigan.

At many universities, botany has been absorbed into large biology departments, and collections put into storage. That has not happened at UW-Madison.

"The combination of having a botany department and a big herbarium is getting pretty rare," said David Baum, botany department chairman. "And more and more herbaria are closing or making the decision to move off campus into storage, which has a real negative effect on research."

Cameron himself is an example of a modern researcher who benefits from traditional specimens. He came to the herbarium in 2008 from the New York Botanical Gardens where he did molecular research using genetics to decipher plants' evolutionary paths.

At the UW-Madison, he keeps a molecular research lab upstairs from the herbarium. Dried plant samples, he said, give researchers the potential to track climate change or biodiversity. For example, tracking lichens, which are extremely sensitive to air quality, can show when an urban area has become so polluted that lichens disappear.

William S. Alverson, a senior conservation ecologist and botanist at The Field Museum in Chicago, praised the UW herbarium for remaining accessible.

"It provides a critical and permanent record of our botanical heritage, and serves to train students and inform natural resource decisions," Alverson said. "It is a very accessible resource to state citizens, and is open to amateur and professional biologists, as well as anyone interested in the flora of the state."

Adding to the importance of maintaining a collection in Wisconsin is that several ecosystem types meet in this state, said Andrew Hipp, a UW-Madison graduate and curator of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Ill.

"Wisconsin has boreal forest, woodlands, prairies, northern bogs — it is floristically fascinating," he said. "A herbarium is a time capsule, kept in the university to provide a record of the changing flora, giving us information on climate change, urbanization and things that lead to the loss of species."

Comprehensive database

For a decade the herbarium has been working on a comprehensive database of its Wisconsin plants that it can make widely available not just to its most regular users - researchers, students and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources — but also the backyard gardener or farmer. It recently completed that task and is available on the Web at www.botany.wisc.edu/herbarium.

"We are open to anybody here, but we do have to screen visitors," Cameron said. "By putting the information online we can do away with screening and make it more democratic."

And now Cameron's staff is taking that a step further, working on a technical high resolution digital scans of its most important specimens chosen to represent that species.

Unlike many states, Wisconsin does not have a published book of all its flora. This heightens the importance of the database and can be more easily updated as new species or plants are discovered.

With a detailed database, why keep the natural history samples around?

Even from a plant that looks brown, dead and lifeless, a scientist can still extract DNA.

"There's just no substitute for a physical specimen," Cameron noted. "You can't do DNA analysis on a digital image or feel the texture or smell."