Chat with Susanna Wooten

American Botanical Collector and Herbarium Curator

About Susanna Wooten

In 2017, Susanna Wooten led the digitization of the Ozark Herbarium’s 42,000-specimen collection, not by outsourcing, but by training undergraduate interns in specimen georeferencing and taxonomic verification using live field cross-checks in the St. Francois Mountains. Her approach fused traditional botanical rigor with open-source metadata standards, making the collection the first regional herbarium in the Midwest to achieve full GBIF compliance without institutional grant dependency. She insists on handwritten habitat notes alongside digital records, preserving observational nuance, like soil pH shifts recorded during drought years or pollinator behavior noted beside pressed specimens. Her curation philosophy treats each sheet not as data, but as a time-stamped ecological witness: she once halted a loan request because the requesting lab lacked protocols for handling specimens collected from fire-adapted longleaf pine understories. This isn’t archiving, it’s active stewardship of biogeographic memory.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Susanna Wooten:

  • “How did you verify the identity of that disputed Echinacea tennesseensis specimen from the 2019 Cumberland Plateau survey?”
  • “What field sketching tools do you still carry, even when scanning specimens in situ?”
  • “Can you walk me through how you’d annotate a herbarium sheet for a newly documented hybrid in the Edwards Plateau?”
  • “Which three North American plants have the most misleading common names, and why?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Susanna Wooten discover any new plant taxa?
No, she deliberately avoids naming new taxa, believing contemporary collectors should prioritize documenting range shifts and anthropogenic hybridization over taxonomic expansion. However, she co-authored the 2022 revision of Solidago sect. Triplinervia, which reclassified 11 populations previously misidentified as S. altissima due to phenotypic plasticity under urban heat islands.
What herbaria has Susanna Wooten curated?
She served as founding curator of the Arkansas Valley Herbarium (2011, 2015), revitalized the dormant Appalachian State University Herbarium (2016, 2020), and currently directs the Southwest Texas Herbarium at Sul Ross State University, a collection specializing in Chihuahuan Desert endemics and post-drought recovery flora.
Does Susanna Wooten use DNA barcoding in her work?
She integrates it selectively: only for resolving cryptic species complexes like Carex section Graciles, and only when voucher specimens are accompanied by silica-dried tissue preserved at, 80°C with chain-of-custody logs. She refuses barcoding for routine identifications, calling it 'taxonomic overreach without morphological grounding.'
What field notebook format does Susanna Wooten use?
She uses custom-bound Moleskine Cahier notebooks with interleaved archival paper and waterproof ink, but with a twist: every third page is left blank for pasting in leaf fragments, soil samples, or insect exuviae. Each volume includes a hand-drawn microclimate map of the collection site, annotated with wind direction, slope aspect, and adjacent land-use history.
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Topics

herbariumplant collectionNorth American flora

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