By Jeff Hunter ’96

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Thanks to the fruits of a lot of labor involving the gathering and cataloging of regional vegetation, two collections of plant life evolved into one very impressive herbarium on the Utah State University Uintah Basin campus.

Currently located on the second floor of the Bingham Entrepreneurship and Energy Research Center in Vernal, the USUUB Herbarium boasts roots going back more than a century.

Longtime USFS ecologist and USU Uintah Basin lab instructor Sherel Goodrich, recalls working in the Ashley National Forest Supervisor’s Office where the U.S. Forest Service housed a treasure trove of examples of local flora dating back to 1914. But the weight of the collection of plants, displays, and file cabinets eventually proved to be too much.

“The engineers came down from Ogden, took a look at the building, and said, ‘That herbarium’s about to crash the floor in,’” Goodrich says. “So, that started the process by which a memorandum of understanding was signed between USU and the Forest Service, and that herbarium over there wound up here.

“And so, essentially, it’s USU’s herbarium now. It’s just they’re not separate; the specimens are intermingled.”

A native of the tiny Uintah County community of Tridell, Goodrich graduated from Union High School in Roosevelt in 1961, completed a bachelor’s degree in range management at Utah State University in ’71, and secured a master’s in plant taxonomy — the branch of botany that deals with the classification, identification, naming, and description of plants — at Brigham Young University in 1981. After spending time in Provo and working for the U.S. Forest Service in different locations around the Intermountain West, Goodrich procured a position as an ecologist for the USFS in the Ashley National Forest in 1984, settled in the Vernal area, and went about exploring and collecting plants in the Uinta Mountains and around the Uintah Basin.

Goodrich has made massive contributions to both the USFS and USUUB herbaria during his long career, while also co-authoring Uinta Basin Flora with Elizabeth Neese in 1986, and Uinta Flora: A Guide to the Vascular Plants of the Uinta Basin and Uinta Mountains with USFS ecologist Allen Huber in 2014.

And while he technically retired as a full-time employee of the U.S. Forest Service in 2011, Goodrich has continued to be involved with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) projects, as well as serving as a lab instructor at USUUB, following his retirement.

Thanks to contributors like Goodrich from government and state agencies, and another local legend of botany, Lorin Squires, the herbarium in the Bingham Research Center now boasts an estimated 13,000 specimens, most of them from the Uinta Basin, as well as the Salt Creek Range and the Wyoming Range of western Wyoming.

“Dr. Lorin Squires started the herbarium here shortly after this institution got it’s beginning in the building on the highway,” says Goodrich, who taught at USU Uintah Basin from 1997 to 2016. “He housed that herbarium in a cubby-hole, you could hardly turn around in there. Then he was instrumental in attaining the room upstairs (in the Bingham Research Center) and starting that herbarium.”

The Uintah Basin campus that opened in Roosevelt in 1967 is recognized as Utah State’s first regional campus in the history of the land-grant university. And after holding night classes at Uintah High School for years, USU acquired its own space in southwest Vernal along U.S. Route 40 in 1991. That’s where Squires, who started teaching biology at Utah State in 1986, opened USU Uintah Basin’s original herbarium.

The extensive collection of preserved plant specimens was later moved to the Bingham Research Center after that building opened its doors in 2010, shortly after Squires, who passed away in 2024, retired as a full-time assistant professor. Just before his retirement, Squires also managed to register USUUB with the Index Herbarium, a global directory of public herbaria maintained by the New York Botanical Garden.

The earliest specimen housed in the USU Uintah Basin Herbarium is an example of a grass-like plant known as Carex douglasii collected by Charles DeMoisy, Jr., on May 10, 1914, in an area about 30 miles west of Vernal known as Whiterocks. One of the original rangers at the time the Ashley National Forest was created in 1908, DeMoisy cataloged a total of 21 specimens in 1914 that can currently be found in the Southwest Environmental Information Network (SEINet), a collaborative biodiversity data platform that provides access to plant, animal, and ecological specimen data.

Other early collectors included Forest Service ranger George Walkup, who collected 89 specimens currently in SEINet, between 1922 and ’41. And in more recent decades, Squires, Goodrich, Huber, BLM botanist Sandra Robins, and USU graduate researcher Lisa Boyd have also provided notable contributions to the USUUB Herbarium.

Boyd, who completed a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology at Utah State in 2015 and a master’s at USU in natural resources in ’16, spent three years serving as a research assistant at the herbarium. She is now an adjutant professor at USUUB, where she teaches a course on range plant taxonomy and labs on wildland plants and ecosystems, and forest plant identification and function that all utilize materials housed at the herbarium.

In addition to being a valuable educational collection, the USUUB Herbarium is also a frequently used resource for the identification of regional plants.

Northeastern Utah is rich with oil shale and natural gas deposits, which has led to the convergence of many petroleum companies upon the area of the Colorado Plateau known as the Uintah Basin. Those companies are required to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which makes it mandatory to assess the environmental effects of their actions prior to making decisions about things like drilling or mining.

“The Uintah Basin for some reason — I think because the glaciers shoved seeds and plants down into the basin, and they couldn’t get out — has a high percentage of endemic plant species,” Boyd explains. “So, anytime something has a federal permit or is on federal surface, they have to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, which involves doing an environmental assessment. And part of that is assessing any impacts.

“So, we have to look at cultural and archaeological impacts, threatened and endangered species, sensitive species, and range impact. It’s a great list, and we have to check for all of them.”

Boyd shares a story of a recent environmental assessment surrounding a road overhaul that impacted a low-growing plant known as Horseshoe Milkvetch (Astragalus equisolensis), which can only be found in Uintah County and the northwestern corner of Colorado.

“It was petitioned for listing as a sensitive species but didn’t get listed, but it’s still considered sensitive,” Boyd says. “It must love disturbance. It was growing in a road, and they were upgrading that road. We counted and there were about 900 plants that were going to be taken out on the road. So, we went in and did specimens and collected them to send to various herbariums, and to have some here instead of just wasting those plants.”

Now 82 years old, Goodrich still loves to hike and continues to seek out plant specimens in the Uintah Basin region, while also curating other samples provided by private groups and organizations tasked with creating compliance surveys.

“I’m in contact with those people now, and they’ve graduated into a very impressive group,” notes Goodrich, who has collected more than 30,000 specimens during his career. “They come to me with additions to the flora. If you find a new plant in the Uintah Basin, then that’s an addition to that flora.”