Welcome to the Herbaria

The University and Jepson Herbaria and the Consortium of California Herbaria have partnered in an innovative project, led by our PhD alum Matthew Kling, to provide a new spatial tool to help parks and protected areas in California select plant seeds for resilience to climate change.

Prompted by the current crisis involving the Duke University Herbarium, faculty leaders from three other large university herbaria including Brent Mishler at UC/JEPS have written a paper detailing the many uses of herbaria, focused on their essential place in a research university. See this link for a timeline of all the news on this topic.

Five Herbaria-affiliated graduate students received their PhDs at the May 2024 Integrative Biology commencement ceremony, continuing a 126 year-old tradition of botanical graduate education at Berkeley that started in 1898 with the graduation of Willis L. Jepson. We are very proud of the 2024 graduates: Ixchel González-Ramírez, Jaemin Lee, Anna Scharnagl, Maryam Sedaghatpour, and Giovanna Figueroa. The photo at left shows some of the attendees at our graduation celebration in the Herbaria, (L to R) Ixchel González-Ramírez, Brent Mishler, Cindy Looy, Lucia Lohmann, Anna Scharnagl, David Ackerly, Ellen Simms, Jaemin Lee, and Klara Scharnagl.

Have you been wanting to visit the University & Jepson Herbaria (UC/JEPS)? Well, you’re in luck! We are officially announcing the beginning of regular public herbaria tours. Four times a year, there will be the opportunity to come learn all about UC/JEPS and herbaria. We’ll discuss how we started, how herbarium specimens are collected and how they end up here, our curation practices, ongoing projects, and so much more! Beautiful specimens will be on display, and curators from the different collections will be available for questions. There are two tours coming soon:

Thursday, April 25th at 10:30AM and Thursday, July 11th at 10:30AM

Spots are limited! Sign up here today if you’re interested in a tour: https://forms.gle/xoWv57RD3TTNtRNG6

Tour groups will meet at the front of the herbaria, located at: 1001 Valley Life Sciences Building Berkeley, CA 94720-2465

We look forward to seeing you!

Sara Plummer Lemmon Collection Catalog now Available

Wynne Brown, author of The Forgotten Botanist: Sara Plummer Lemmon's Life of Science and Art has completed a catalog of the paintings in the Sara Plummer Lemmon Collection. The 565 items in this once at-risk collection are now re-housed in archival folders and boxes and are individually cataloged. We greatly appreciate Wynne's dedication to this project and thank Susan Filter, Save Peterson, and Amy St. John for their assistance with rehousing and cataloging the collection. The catalog is available here.

A gala celebration was held on Saturday, October 14, 2023, sponsored by the Friends of the Jepson Herbarium, to thank Brent Mishler for his 30 years of leadership as Director of the University and Jepson Herbaria (1993-2023) and to welcome Lúcia Lohmann, the new Director who started July 2023. See more photos from the event here.

Faculty curator Noah Whiteman has just published a fascinating book on the relationships between plants, their poisons, and humans. See the campus news story here: https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/10/24/nature-s-poisons-why-we-love-them-and-abuse-them and Noah’s Lab website here: https://www.noahwhiteman.org/

Nina House, Museum Scientist at the University & Jepson Herbaria, was recently invited to be a featured guest on KQED Forum. The interview focused on the new California law AB 1573, legislation that would require landscaping and restoration efforts on public lands use 75% California native plants. You can listen to the episode here.

As part of the 150 Years of Women at Berkeley celebration (https://150w.berkeley.edu/) we were fortunate to have Dr. Sheila M. Humphreys (EECS Emerita Director of Diversity) create biographies of twenty-one women associated with the Botany Department at UC Berkeley. Her publication is now available on our website here.

A new study by former UC/JEPS graduate student Isaac Lichter-Marck and his major professor, Jepson Curator Bruce Baldwin, explores the role of edaphic specialization and life history switches in the evolution of rock daisies, and uses this system to examine potential limits on the responses of desert angiosperms to global climate change. The paper is available here, and the UC news release is here.

A new book is out, edited by former UC/JEPS postdoc Brian Swartz and UC/JEPS director Brent Mishler, entitled Speciesism in Biology and Culture: How Human Exceptionalism is Pushing Planetary Boundaries. It incudes 9 chapters containing wide-ranging discussions about the sociopolitical, cultural, and scientific ramifications of speciesism and world views that derive from it, integrating natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Thanks to a Sawyer Seminar Grant from the Mellon Foundation, it is available free in open access here — also see the university news release here.

The Jepson eFlora Revision 11 was published in December 2022! One of the new species included is Silene nelsonii (image courtesy of Steve Matson). For the full details, please see the summary here: https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/eflora/supplement_summary.html

A new Spanish language video explaining herbaria and some of the research done there has just been produced by Un Vistazo al Laboratorio in association with Science at Cal and the Mexican Consulate in San Francisco. The video stars UC/JEPS graduate student Ixchel González-Ramírez.

A wonderful new book entitled "John Gill Lemmon: Andersonville Survivor and California Botanist" by Brad Agnew and Kelly Agnew features the archives of the University and Jepson Herbaria. See university news story here and accompanying video here.

The Jepson eFlora Revision 10 was published in April 2022! One of the new species included is Chorizanthe eastwoodiae (image courtesy of Keir Morse). For the full details, please see the summary here: https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/eflora/supplement_summary.html

We are sad to announce that Rudi Schmid passed away January 4th, 2022. He was an active faculty member at UC Berkeley for over 30 years, 1972-2003, as well as a curator in the University and Jepson Herbaria. He had research interests in plant anatomy and was an advocate for botanical documentation and a champion of floristic efforts, including the Jepson Flora Project. He has established an endowment fund in the Herbaria to support research on and curation of conifers; if you would like to contribute to this fund, please contact Staci Markos (smarkos@berkeley.edu).

The Jepson eFlora Revision 9 was published in December 2021! One of the new species included is Linanthus maculatus subsp. maculatus (image courtesy of Keir Morse). For the full details, please see the summary here: https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/eflora/supplement_summary.html

Schedule of 2022 Jepson Workshops Now Available!. Both virtual and in-person workshop will be offered. Members only registration: December 1–7, 2021. General public registration begins December 8, 2021

The annual North American botanical meeting Botany 2021 was held virtually July 18-23, 2021. Several UC/JEPS researchers were "there." Bruce Baldwin’s talk on the Jepson Flora Project can be seen here; Klara Scharnagl’s talk on lichen biology is here; and Brent Mishler’s talk on species is here.

A new book entitled "What, if Anything, are Species?" by UC/JEPS Director Brent Mishler explores this controversial topic in detail, based on 40 years of investigation. He concludes that species are nothing special; entities currently given that rank are simply clades like taxa at all other levels on the tree of life. He goes into the advantages of fully rankless classification, and of a multi-level approach to ecology and evolution. The book is open access; it is freely accessible here.

A virtual Jepson Workshop was held Saturday, January 30, 2021: "Wonders of a dryland moss: Syntrichia from genomes to ecosystems," hosted in partnership with the collaborative research project "Desiccation and Diversity in Dryland Mosses," with funding provided by the US National Science Foundation. In order to make the workshop available more broadly, recordings of all eight 15-minute presentations have been uploaded to YouTube. See introductory page and links to this self-paced workshop here.

The Jepson eFlora Revision 8 was published in December 2020! One of the new species included is Ceanothus pendletonensis (image courtesy of John Rebman). For the full details, please see the summary here: https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/eflora/supplement_summary.html