The University and Jepson Herbaria of the University of California at Berkeley are two
collections of pressed plants housed together along with research labs, libraries, and archives.
Together the Herbaria hold about 2,200,000 specimens, one of the largest collections in North America.
•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 Fall 2023 session. Meetings are Fridays at noon,
in 1002 VLSB and on Zoom — all are welcome!
June 8, 2023
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.
June 19, 2022
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.
January 24, 2022
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.)
December 6, 2021
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.
November 2, 2020
Using seaweeds to read the history of the oceans! Kathy Ann Miller, Curator of Algae in the University Herbarium,
was featured in a colorful article in The Guardian speaking to the importance of collections for baseline understanding of
marine environments and how they are changing. See news story here. Also, see our developing
California seaweed eFlora here.
September 20, 2020
A baseline for monitoring extinction in the Anthropocene.
Jepson Curator Bruce Baldwin and UC/JEPS Director Brent Mishler contributed to an analysis documenting which plants in
North America have already gone extinct. Available data suggest 65 vascular plant taxa from this region have become extinct since
European settlement, 19 from California alone (thumbnail shows one of them,
Calochortus monanthus,
the only specimen ever collected, in 1876). Read the open source paper
here,
and New York Times article here.
August 4, 2020
Woody vines do the twist! The research of Joyce Chery, done as part of her PhD dissertation in the labs of UC/JEPS curators Chelsea Specht and Carl Rothfels,
was featured in the New York Times.
She showed how the unique evolution and development of wood in lianas allows them to be both strong and flexible, to twist through the forest canopy without breaking. Dr. Chery is currently an assistant professor at Cornell University.
See her webpage here.
July 24, 2020
Mosses can hide under rocks in the desert! Jenna Ekwealor, a graduate student in the Mishler Lab, along with alumna Kirsten Fisher, made this fascinating and unique discovery while studying how mosses are able to live and reproduce in dry deserts.
See university news article here,
New York Times article here,
NPR radio interview here,
and the research paper here.
June 18, 2020
The University and Jepson Herbaria joins in the stand against systemic racism and urges us all to make meaningful changes in our
personal and professional lives to promote equity in our communities. UC/JEPS is committed to fostering an environment that is
supportive, welcoming, and respectful of all individuals; see the campus principles of community
here.
We welcome feedback about improvements we can make.
December 20, 2019
The Jepson eFlora Revision 7 was published in December 2019! One of the new species included is Brodiaea matsonii (photo by Robert Preston). For the full details, please see the summary here: https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/eflora/supplement_summary.html
December 2, 2019
The 2020 schedule for Jepson Herbarium Workshops is now available! There are educational opportunities for a broad audience of professional and amateur botanists. The weekend workshop program is celebrating its 27th season and will offer courses in basic botany, plant taxonomy, regional floras, ecology, and more! For the full slate of workshops, and to enroll, please see: https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/workshops
October 21, 2019
UC/JEPS alum Ekaphan (“Bier") Kraichak received this year's “Young Scientist Award” in Thailand. It is given annually to outstanding scientists under the age of 35, and was presented by Princess Sirindhorn herself. Bier received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2012, studying evolutionary ecology of liverworts in Brent Mishler’s lab, and is now an assistant professor in Botany at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand.
August 09, 2019
UC/JEPS faculty, staff, and students played a major role in the recently concluded Botany 2019 meeting. The most exciting news is that three graduate students were recognized for best student talks in three different sections: Isaac Marck won the George R. Cooley Award, Joyce Chery won the Katherine Esau Award, and Jenna Ekwealor received Honorable Mention for the A.J. Sharp Award. See our Facebook page for more details.
March 14, 2019
Join BigGive by making a gift to support undergraduate students working at the University and Jepson Herbaria. Here, they will gain valuable skills in botany and conservation biology while helping us document biodiversity and share data with the world. https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/14463.
November 19, 2018
A new study has been published by a UC/JEPS team evaluating conservation priorities across California from several different evolutionary standpoints, to guide land conservation efforts. Read the campus news story here and here, the research paper here, and explore the data and methods in an interactive web link here.
October 22, 2018
The Jepson eFlora Revision 6 was published in September 2018! One of the new species included is Erythranthe shevockii (photo by John Game). For the full details, please see the summary here: https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/eflora/supplement_summary.html
August 15, 2018
The University and Jepson Herbaria recently completed a NPS funded project to database and image over 1000 specimens collected by John Muir and housed at the John Muir National Historic Site in Martinez, California. Specimens were collected in Canada and Indiana in 1864-1867 and on his world tour in 1903-1904. Many of the specimens were in poor condition and were carefully remounted by plant mounter extraordinaire, Ana Penny. The Muir specimens are accessible via our Specimen Portal: https://webapps.cspace.berkeley.edu/ucjeps/publicsearch/publicsearch/
April 30, 2018
The University and Jepson Herbaria collaborated on an exhibit entitled Sustaining Grandeur: The First 100 Years of Save the Redwoods League, on display in the Bancroft Gallery in Doe Annex, April through August, 2018 (10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday). For details on assembling the exhibit, which includes specimens and archival material from the Herbaria, please see: http://news.lib.berkeley.edu/sustaining-grandeur
January 8, 2018
The Jepson eFlora Revision 5 was published in December 2017! One of the new species included is Vaccinium shastense (photo by Steve Matson). For the full details, please see the summary here: https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/eflora/supplement_summary.html
October 30, 2017
A second paper has been published by the same UC/JEPS team referenced in a previous news item on this page (April 11, 2017), adding phylogenetic methods to the study of diversity and endemism in the California flora. This novel "spatial phylogenetics" approach makes it possible to evaluate biodiversity from an evolutionary standpoint, including discovering significant areas of neo- and paleo-endemism. Read the campus news story here and the open-source paper here.
October 5, 2017
Ingrid Jordon-Thaden, the lab manager for Assistant Professor/Curator Carl Rothfels of Integrative Biology and University and Jepson Herbaria, has been featured in a news article for UC Berkeley Research-IT (RIT). For the full article, click this link.
October 1, 2017
We are sad to announce that UC/JEPS Researcher Daniel Norris passed away September 30, 2017. Dan was an internationally famous bryologist, as well as a mentor for many students and colleagues in bryology. He is greatly missed here, and around the world. ... Read more here
April 11, 2017
New study published by a UC/JEPS team uses specimen-based distributional data, diversity metrics that include species’ relative breadth of range, and a randomization test, to map biodiversity and endemism for California native vascular plants. Download the PDF of full paper here.
March 17, 2017
UC/JEPS graduate students Joyce Chery and Carrie Tribble star in a two-part series telling the story of herbaria, including how to make plant collections, how they are curated, and how they are used in research, as part of the Science in Real Life series.
Plant Collecting & Herbarium Research ... Part 1.
Plant Collecting & Herbarium Research ... Part 2.
February 14, 2017
The Jepson eFlora Revision 4 was published in December 2016! One of the new species included is Adiantum shastense (photo by Julie Kierstead Nelson). For the full details, please see the summary here: https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/eflora/supplement_summary.html
January 18, 2017
UC/JEPS Researcher Benito Ching Tan has died. He was an internationally famous bryologist, as well as a helpful colleague and mentor for California botanists. We will miss him greatly.... Read more here...
and 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...
