They may be rivals on the basketball court. But in the herbarium, Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill are putting down roots together.
Duke and UNC are merging their collections of preserved plant specimens, or herbaria, to create the third-largest such trove at a university in the country — beat by only Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley.
In 2024, Duke indicated it would close its herbarium because it couldn’t afford to maintain it, the Duke Chronicle reported. Scientists realized the university’s facilities were outdated, and that improvement “would require years of work and extensive disruption to the collection,” according to Duke. The school needed to move its 825,000 specimens.
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Now, those hundreds of thousands of specimens have found a home — down the road in Chapel Hill.
UNC’s herbarium, housed in Coker Hall, is managed by the North Carolina Botanical Garden. Now, Duke’s will be under its management too. That school is transferring its plant specimens, storage equipment, data and digital imagery, historical materials, microscopes, and more.
Starting next summer, all of that will be housed in two vacant floors of the former Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center in Chapel Hill. Duke will pay for the costs of packing and moving the herbarium, UNC says. The preparation of the space, which is already underway, is covered by philanthropic dollars.
Eventually, UNC plans to build a Plant Biodiversity Research Center in Chapel Hill that will house all 1.7 million specimens from both schools together. The school will need to seek separate funding for this project.
These collections are used by researchers and students “to study long-term climate shifts, invasive species, changes in land use, evolution, conservation and other changes in plant life across generations,” UNC says. They’re also open to North Carolina residents — though visiting may require an appointment.
Duke’s herbarium will remain available to Duke researchers, staff and students, UNC says.
