In spring 2014, BRIT received the gift of the Gretchen and Stanley Jones Palynological Collection (a special collection for the study of pollen), personally built by Dr. Gretchen Jones over her career at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) where she was a Palynological Research Botanist with the Agricultural Research Service. This gift consisted of 150+ hard-bound and paper-backed pollen reference books, nearly 50 binders of printed Light- and Scanning Electron Micrographs (SEM) of pollen, over 5000 microscope slides of pollen, associated pollen vials and packets, SEM stubs, associated digital metadata and images, and a research grade Olympus compound microscope. The Collection can be accessed, by appointment, at BRIT.
The microscope slides are carefully stored horizontally in trays in specialized wooden slide cabinets. Each slide has a unique number indicating its position in the slide cabinets, along with other metadata written on the slide slip. These microslides are skeletally catalogued, using received digital files as a template, and the GSJPC Microslide Google Sheet is available to search this collection. In addition, as they become available, whole-tray images of the microslides are available here.
The binders of light micrographs and scanning electron micrographs, and any associated negatives, are organized alphabetically according to plant family and genus, and can be physically accessed in the BRIT herbarium. Prior to its arrival at BRIT, digitized micrographs from this collection were available as a reference collection of pollen images at a site hosted by the USDA, a site which is now defunct. As of summer 2019, the digitized pollen micrographs from this collection are available online in the BRIT Pollen Image Gallery.All micrographs not determined to genus level have been omitted from this image gallery, with all genus indets located together. A catalogue of available micrographs can be accessed via the GSJPC Micrograph Google Sheet.
The pollen reference books are deposited in the BRIT Library, with duplicates in the BRIT Herbarium reference collection. The BRIT Library catalog can be searched through the Library pages.
Visit the BRIT Pollen Image Gallery.
See the GSJPC Microslide Catalogue.
See the GSJPC Micrograph Catalogue.
