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Home / Institutions & Organisations / Selected Botanical Gardens and Herbaria / Botanical Gardens Directories

Part of "Environment Australia", a program of the Federal Government: Australian National Botanic Gardens.

Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley (UCMP):
! Gardens and Cultures.
! Herbaria and Museums. Extensive lists of gardens and cultures and herbaria and museums. Superbly done.

! BiologyBrowser (produced by Thomson Scientific). This is a free web site offering resources for the life sciences information community. Go to: Subject > Botany > Botanical gardens.

! Botanique (Herald 21): Directory of Botanical Resources. Go to: Gardens, Arboreta & Nature Sites of North America. Botanique is the portal to over 2100 gardens, arboreta, and nature sites for the USA and Canada. See also: TOUR GARDENS and ARBORETA of the US and CANADA lists more than 1600 botanical and display gardens and arboreta.

Bundesanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Ernährung (BLE), Germany: Inventory of biological research collections in Germany (ZEFOD): ZEFOD ("Zentralregister biologischer Forschungssammlungen in Deutschland") is an information system on botanical and zoological research collections in Germany. Find information about botanical gardens, herbaria and colllections of algae. Go to: Botanic gardens in Germany (in German).

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: Multisite Living Collections Searches. The data available in these searches are extracted from the on-line Living Collections databases at The Royal Horticultural Society (UK), World Conservation Monitoring Centre (Threatened Plants), The Sir Harold Hillier Gardens and Arboretum (UK), Holden Arboretum (USA), Arnold Arboretum (USA), Cornell Plantations (USA), Phipps Conservatory and Botanic Gardens (USA), The New York Botanical Garden (USA) and The Desert Botanical Garden (USA).

W.A. Friedman (2020): Darwin in the garden: Engaging the public about evolution with museum collections of living objects. Open access, Plants, People, Planet, 2: 294–301.
"... Polls continue to show distressingly high percentages of people around the world do not accept that evolution has occurred.
[...] It is time for botanical gardens and arboreta around the world to commit to leveraging their living collections of museum objects to explain and demonstrate the roles of mutation, variation, and selection in the evolutionary process. In doing so, much could be accomplished to increase scientific literacy at a societal level.

J.R. Hoppe & E. Boos, Department of Systematic Botany, Ulm University, Germany: Botanical Garden Information System. Excellent!

S.S. Renner (2022): Plant Evolution and Systematics 1982–2022: Changing Questions and Methods as Seen by a Participant. In PDF, Progress in Botany.
See also here.
"... With DNA data came lab work, bioinformatics, and both the need and the possibility to collaborate, which brought systematists out of their niche, gave comparative biology a huge push, and resulted in a better integration of biodiversity studies within biology. ..."

SysTax. A database system for systematics and taxonomy. The SysTax database system comprises concept-based botanical and zoological systematics, literature, botanic gardens, herbaria, and zoological collections, etc. Go to:
Taxon Browser, Botany.

Verband Botanischer Gärten e.V. (in German): Go to: Informationssystem Botanischer Gärten. Botanical garden information system.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Botanical garden.
! List of botanical gardens.

Home / Institutions & Organisations / Selected Botanical Gardens and Herbaria / Selected Botanical Gardens

The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, Boston, MA.
Chicago Botanic Garden
The State Botanical Garden of Georgia
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Herbarium and Resources, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne
Missouri Botanical Garden
The New York Botanical Garden, The Bronx, New York
San Antonio Botanical Garden
The United States National Arboretum
Julius-von-Sachs-Institute of Biological Sciences with Botanical Garden, University of Würzburg

H. Prier et al. (2004): Exotische Gehölze im KIRCHHEIMER-Arboretum Freiburg. PDF file, in German. LGRB-Informationen, Heft 15 (Landesamt für Geologie, Rohstoffe und Bergbau Baden-Württemberg, Freiburg i. Br.). See also here.

Home / Institutions & Organisations / Selected Botanical Gardens and Herbaria / Herbaria

! The L. H. Bailey Hortorium Herbarium (BH).
BH at Cornell University is one of the largest university-affiliated collections of preserved plant material in North America. It includes Cornell's Wiegand Herbarium (CU), which was merged with BH in 1977. The combined herbaria now number ca. 860,000 specimens of algae, bryophytes, and vascular plants.

Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley (UCMP):
! Gardens and Cultures.
! Herbaria and Museums. Extensive lists of gardens and cultures and herbaria and museums. Superbly done.

Botanische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Südwestdeutschland e.V. (in German):
Links.
Links zu Herbarien.
Links zu Bilddatenbanken.

Bundesanstalt für Landwirtschaft und Ernährung (BLE), Germany: Inventory of biological research collections in Germany (ZEFOD): ZEFOD ("Zentralregister biologischer Forschungssammlungen in Deutschland") is an information system on botanical and zoological research collections in Germany. Find information about botanical gardens, herbaria and colllections of algae. Go to: Herbarien (in German).

The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN): CHIN is a national centre of excellence that provides a visible face to Canada's heritage through the world of networked information. Search for:
Botany.
Palynology.
Paleontology.

! C.C. Davis (2023): The herbarium of the future. In PDF, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 38: 412-423.
See also here.
"... An open access ‘global metaherbarium’ is emerging
[...] herbaria must continue to use digitization to reduce barriers to their access and build partnerships to fully embrace the global interconnected herbarium of the future ..."

C. Del Rio (2023): Replicability in palaeobotany: Toward a standardization of citation of extant material. In PDF, Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology, 317.
See likewise here.
"... The aim of this guide is to standardise the citations of herbarium specimens, personal collections and living specimens ..."

David L. Dilcher, Paleobotany Laboratory, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL: Dilcher's Swamp/Woods Leaf Images.

E.J. Edwards et al. (2024): University herbaria are uniquely important. In PDF, Trends in Plant Science, 29.
See here as well.
"... University herbaria play critical roles in biodiversity research and training
[...] Universities have a responsibility to steward these important collections in perpetuity, in alignment with their academic missions and for the good of science and society ..."

! The Field Museum, Chicago, IL: Neotropical Herbarium Specimens. Herbarium collections online. Excellent!

P. Figg and B.B. Klitgård (2023), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew:
6 unexpected ways scientists see dried plants helping people and the planet.
Note the Kew Gardens Digitisation Project.

The University of Florida Herbarium (a unit of the Department of Natural History of the Florida Museum of Natural History). Databases and Images. The UF Herbarium´s collection databases and image galleries provide interactive, virtual access. Go to:
Search or Browse All Images Available in the Catalog.

L.E. Garinger (2021): Flora and fonds: activating herbaria as archives. in PDF, Thesis, Department of History, Archival Studies, University of Manitoba. Winnipeg, Manitoba.
See also here.

! R. Guralnick et al. (2024): Humans in the loop: Community science and machine learning synergies for overcoming herbarium digitization bottlenecks. Open access, Appl. Plant Sci., 2024;e11560.
"... Among the slowest steps in the digitization of natural history collections is converting imaged labels into digital text
[...] Our results showcase a >93% success rate for finding and classifying main labels ..."

Harvard University Herbaria.

International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT).
IAPT is dedicated to organismal biodiversity the extent, recognition, organization, evolution, and naming of plants and fungi, both living and fossil. Go to:
! International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (Shenzhen Code, 2018).

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew:
! Plants of the World Online.
Browse 1,424,000 global plant names, 202,500 detailed descriptions, and 372,400 images. Excellent!

J. Mason Heberling (2022): Herbaria as Big Data Sources of Plant Traits. Free access, International Journal of Plant Sciences, 183.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew:
! The Kew Herbarium Catalogue . This Herbarium houses approximately 7 million specimens, collected from all around the world. Navigate from advanced search.

G. Nelson and S. Ellis (2018): The history and impact of digitization and digital data mobilization on biodiversity research. Free access, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 374: 20170391.
See also here.
"... The recent expansion of digital data has placed biodiversity collections on the cusp of big data science, opening multiple pathways for natural history museums ..."

The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), New York:
! Index Herbariorum. Index Herbariorum, a joint project of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) and NYBG, is a detailed directory of 3000+ public herbaria of the world and the 8800+ staff members associated with them. Searching by institution, city, state, acronym, staff member, correspondent, and research specialty (search for: paleobotany or palaeobotany). Telephone and fax numbers and e-mail and URL addresses are included.

The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY:
! Steere Herbarium, Index Herbariorum.
A worldwide index of 3,100 herbaria and 12,000 associated staff where a total of 390 million botanical specimens are permanently housed.

! Plantillustrations.org (by Max Antheunisse and Jan Koeman).
Plantillustrations.org is a completely non-commercial website. On top you see 2 search boxes at the right. The white one is for entering scientific names, the grey one for vernacular ones.
You may likewise navigate from:
the List of currently included artists.
Don't miss the useful link list

National Herbarium Pretoria. The South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI):
Collections at the National Herbarium, Pretoria (PRE).
Scroll down to: "Palaeobotany Herbarium". This houses a superb collection of fossil plants from over 100 localities in southern Africa. The main emphasis is on the Late Triassic Molteno Flora (200 million years ago).
Still available via Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

! K.M. Pryer et al. (2020): Using computer vision on herbarium specimen images to discriminate among closely related horsetails (Equisetum). Open access, Applications in Plant Sciences, 8: e11372. See also here (in PDF).

Department of Phanerogamic Botany, Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm: The Linnean Herbarium. The specimens were once distributed by Linnaeus to his disciples and eventually they became part of the collections of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, subsequently the Swedish Museum of Natural History. The Linnean herbarium at the Swedish Museum of Natural History comprises some 4000 herbarium specimens, several of which are types formally designated by various experts.

Department of Plant Sciences, Tel Aviv University: A List of World Herbaria.
The link is to a version archived by the Internet Archive´s Wayback Machine.

! Tropicos. (The Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, Missouri).
The Tropicos nomenclatural database system links over 1.38M scientific names with over 6.9M specimens and over 1.61M digital images.

Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Virtual herbarium of the flora of Germany (in German).

! Department of Phanerogamic Botany, Swedish Museum of Natural History: Linnean herbarium (S-LINN): Superbly done!

! Visual Plants. Based on a scientific database, the program can be used for the visual determination of plants. Now with around 22000 images, mostly with geo-referenced information. You can search using taxon names or via plant characters.
Worth checking out: Dalitz, H. and Homeier, J. (2004): Visual Plants - An image based tool for plant diversity research. Lyonia, 6: 47-59.
See also here (in German).

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Herbarium.
! List of herbaria.
Virtual herbarium.
Herbar Digital.

P. Wilf et al. (2021): An image dataset of cleared, x-rayed, and fossil leaves vetted to plant family for human and machine learning. Open access, PhytoKeys, 187: 93–128. Go to:
! Dataset (available from the Figshare Plus repository). Image collection and supporting data for: An image dataset of cleared, x-rayed, and fossil leaves vetted to plant family for human and machine learning.
See also:
From museum to laptop: Visual leaf library a new tool for identifying plants (by Matthew Carroll, March 15, 2022).
Penn State: From museum to laptop: Visual leaf library a new tool for identifying plants.

! C.G. Willis et al. (2017): Old Plants, New Tricks: Phenological Research Using Herbarium Specimens. In PDF, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 32: 531-546. See also here.
"... Herbarium specimens provide a window into the past that increases our temporal, geographic – and taxonomic vision of how phenology – and potentially plant success and ecosystem processes, have changed and will continue to be affected as the climate changes. With a thorough and growing understanding of the potential and limitations of this rich historical data source, combined with the modern tools of digitization, data sharing, and integration, researchers will increasingly be able to address critical questions about plant biology ..."

! World Flora Online (WFO).
World Flora Online is the international initiative to achieve Target 1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation and provides a global overview of the diversity of plant species.