The NEBC herbarium limits its scope to the six New England states and is the largest collection for this region anywhere. The vascular herbarium (with more than 253,000 sheets) is currently being integrated with the vascular holdings of the Harvard University Herbaria, but will be maintained in separate color-coded folders (along with Harvard's specimens from the New England states). All loans of specimens are handled through the Harvard University Herbaria. The Club's holdings include many specimens collected by Merritt Fernald, Kate Furbish, James Watson Robbins and William Oakes. The vascular herbarium has particularly good representation for Mt. Desert Island, Maine; Coos Co., New Hampshire; the vicinity of Boston, Massachussets; Essex Co., Massachusetts; Cape Cod; Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Type specimen data and other databases for our vascular plants are included in the Harvard University Herbaria online databases. The Club's nonvascular herbarium is housed at Harvard's Farlow Herbarium and is also in the process of being merged with the collections there.

Our acquisition policy for vascular plant specimens was published in our journal Rhodora Volume 90, pages 105- 109 (1988) and available HERE as a pdf file. Due to space limitations in the herbarium buliding we generally limit our representation regardless of date collected to three different townships or cities for most counties of New England. For certain small counties of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont the limit is one township or city. For certain large counties of Maine and Coos County, New Hampshire this limit is applied to subdivisions of those counties (see this Key Map of the for these divisions). For regionally uncommon taxa where there is only one folder of specimens in our collection for New England for the taxon the limit of three or one different townships or cities per county is increased to five. These are general guidlenes for acceptance. Exceptions are indicated in the NEBC Acquisition Policy cited above.

Acronym: NEBC

Curator of Vascular Plants: Dr. Les Mehrhoff
Curator of Nonvascular Plants: Elizabeth Kneiper
Assistant Curator of Vascular Plants: Walter Kittredge
Associate Curator: Dr. Elizabeth Zacharias


For loans of specimens contact Emily Wood or Walter Kittredge of the curatorial staff of the Harvard University Herbaria.


NEBC Herbarium users please note: The Harvard University Herbaria will require that visitors wishing to bring their own plant specimens into the herbarium for study purposes (as opposed to donation of specimens) will need to submit their plant specimens at least 10 days prior to their planned visit in order that the material can be frozen.

http://www.rhodora.org/Herbarium.html -- Revised: Dec. 8, 2009
This page is sponsored by The New England Botanical Club, Inc.

Contact e-mail address: nebc@rhodora.org