The herbarium's total holdings number around 580,000 specimens, and include vascular and nonvascular plants, fungi, lichens, and marine algae specimens. The herbarium maintains a regional focus on the Pacific Northwest, covering Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory. Other significant collections come from California, the rest of Western North America, and the Pacific Rim.

Our oldest specimens date to the late 1800's. Particularly active periods of growth for the herbarium occurred with the incorporation of the herbarium of J. William Thompson in 1943, and collections made under the direction of C. Leo Hitchcock in the 1930's - 1950's. Currently, 5,000 - 10,000 specimens are added to the collections each year through herbarium-led forays, donations, and exchanges.

Learn more about the history of the herbarium.

Efforts to digitize the herbarium's specimens first began in early 2002 through a joint agreement between the Washington Natural Heritage Program and the Bureau of Land Management to document the county-level distribution of all vascular plant taxa in Washington. 19,000 of the herbarium's specimens were entered into a database for this project, representing one specimen per species per county.

Shortly thereafter, our database was brought online through a separate grant from the Washington Native Plant Society, allowing electronic access to our collections data for the first time.

During 2003 and 2004, data entry was limited mostly to processing new collections generated by each year's forays. Databases were also created for our lichen and fungi collections, with limited data entry performed through volunteer help.

In 2004 the herbarium was awarded an NSF grant (#0346624) which provided funding to database all of our western North American vascular plant specimens. Data entry under this grant began in early 2005 and will wrap up in late 2006 or early 2007. Upon completion, about 200,000 vascular plant specimens will have been entered and will be available online.

During 2004 and 2005 our 1,200 vascular plant type specimens were photographed with the volunteer help of Tad Dilhoff. These specimens will become available online as they are databased.

Our long-term goals include digitizing the label data for all of our collections and making this information available online. Curently, only our vascular plant specimens and types are available online.

The herbarium uses FileMaker 8.0 for backend database management and MySQL/PHP for website hosting. Our FileMaker database was originally obtained from the UCR Herbarium at the University of California, Riverside. We have since extensively modified and then rebuilt their database to suit our needs. Those interested in learning more about our database, or who wish to obtain a blank copy for their own use, should contact Ben Legler (blegler@u.washington.edu)

Links to our online databases are provided below. At present, only our vascular plant specimens are online:

Vascular Plant Collection (Search the Database) Total holdings: 375,000. Specimens online: 169709 Type Specimens: 1304 (Search)

Fungi Collection Total holdings: 48,000. Type Specimens: 350.

Lichen Collection Total holdings: 18,000. Type Specimens: 30. Washington Lichen Checklist

Bryophyte Collection Total holdings: 118,000. Type Specimens: 57.

Algae Collection Total holdings: 23,000. Type Specimens: 30.