Museu Botânico Municipal (Paraná)
Av. Engenheiro Otoja Roguski,
s/nº. Bairro Jardim Botânico. Curitiba. Paraná.
Brasil. CEP: 80.210-390
Brazil
Simone Cristina Massuquetto
Email: scmassuquetto@yahoo.com.br
The Museu Botânico Municipal was established in 16/06/1965, as a donation to the city of Curitiba from the private collection of an enthusiastic field botanist, Dr Gerdt Guenther Hatschbach. At that time, the collection comprised around 18,000 specimens, as well as a specific library of botany containing c. 3,000 publications.
Currently, it is the fourth largest herbarium in Brazil, with 360,000 specimens. Annually, the collection grows by about 15,000 new specimens.
MBM maintains an exchange program involving 207 herbaria (53 Brazilian and 154 foreign plant collections). The state of curation of MBM herbarium is outstanding, with about 90% of its collection named by outstanding plant specialists, making our herbarium into a major international reference for botanical research, receiving, annually, the visit of over 400 researchers, ranging from a majority of renowned taxonomists but always welcoming biodiversity, ecology and conservation specialists, as well as students from diverse fields of plant sciences.
The historic and outstanding collections deposited in the herbarium MBM are mostly centered in the study of the Flora of the State of Paraná, however Dr Hatschbach has travelled extensively throughout the less botanically explored states of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo, where he discovered many new species. The most important collections deposited in MBM are:
- Per Karl Hjalmar Dusén (1901-1916);
- Rudolf Lange (1903-1918);
- Aroldo Frenzel, Günter Tessmann (1943-1955);
- Luiza Tereza Dombrowski (1963-1992);
- Gerdt Guenther Hatschbach (1937- ).
Materials of Special Interest:
Our collection of type-specimens counts with more than 1850 specimens, of which around 30% were collected by the in-house staff and associates of the Botanical Museum.
Apart from the large number of types collected in the State of the Paraná, the type collection contains specimens from several Brazilian regions, such as Bahia, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Espírito Santo, Goiás, Tocantins, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul.
It is estimated that between 95% and 98% of the species that occur in the State of Paraná are deposited in the MBM herbarium, becoming it reference for the project entitled "Flora of the State of the Paraná".
Currently, MBM is actively incorporating evaluable collection of macroscopic fungi from the a Dutch/Brazilian researcher, Dr Andres Maurício de Meijer. This collection, comprising more than 4,000 species, contains 1,500 type specimens of fungi, collected by Dr de Mejier in the State of the Paraná.