The Herbaria at UC Berkeley are a center for botanical research,
training, and outreach. With 2.2 million specimens, online resources,
and opportunities for in-person activities,
the possibilities are endless.
Please contact us!
•The University Herbarium, established in 1895, holds botanical collections
from around the world.
•The Jepson Herbarium, established in 1950, specializes in the vascular
plants of California.
Updated version now available for collectors: A free MS Excel template to manage your collection data,
make labels, and easily upload your specimen data to our database, CollectionSpace. Specimens accompanied by metadata
in this spreadsheet will be given top priority for accessioning in UC/JEPS. ...
Click here for details
Botany Lunch Seminar
schedule has been posted for the Spring 2024 session. Meetings are Fridays at noon,
in 1002 VLSB and on Zoom — all are welcome!
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.
July 3, 2024
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.
June 24, 2024
Searching for the next Jepson Curator.
With the retirement of Bruce Baldwin, following a distinguished career,
we are looking for the next Curator of the Jepson Herbarium, the epicenter of research and education on the vascular plants of California.
The new Curator will lead the Jepson Flora Project and curation of the Jepson Herbarium, pursue their own research interests,
and participate in our outreach programs. More details are here, and here is the application page.
June 1, 2024
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.
April 2, 2024
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
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!
February 28, 2024
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.
January 30, 2024
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.
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.
March 6, 2023
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.
February 27, 2023
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.
January 9, 2023
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.
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.
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).
(Photo: April 7th, 2003 - Rudi Schmid at Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve.)
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
(Photos Left-to-Right: White Mountains, Granite Mountains (Jim Andre), Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve (Joy Baccei), Erysimum menziesii, Mendocino County.)
August 6, 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.
April 25, 2021
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.
February 8, 2021
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 Consortium of California Herbaria serves as a gateway to information from California vascular plant specimens that are housed in herbaria throughout the state. The display now includes information from 1.8 million specimen records, all searchable through a single interface. Read more...
Evolutionary and systematic studies of Californian vascular plants are a major research focus of the Baldwin Lab in the Jepson Herbarium, where investigations of the highly diverse native tarweeds and their Hawaiian-silversword descendants continue apace. Read more...