Welcome to the Virtual Herbarium

The Virtual Herbarium now contains 80,000 specimens, including 4,000 palms.

• Taxonomy is now derived from work of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group.
• The Dan Austin Convolvulaceae Collection is now available for simple searches.
• The Herbarium of the National Trust for the Cayman Islands (CAYM) is available here.
• Multiple Herbaria can be searched at once.

Florida Flora Picture Gallery

This is a gallery of photos of species - native, naturalized or commonly encountered in the wild in Florida. It started out a resource for a Local Flora class, but has become a popular identification aid because of the breadth of sampling.

Interactive Keys

There are millions of plants in the world and it is often extremely difficult to tell which species you happen to be looking at. We used to use dichotomous keys (which are like flow charts) to lead us to the correct name but these can be very difficult to use and are dependent on the availability of all of the characteristics used in the key (e.g. if the key says “flowers blue or flowers yellow”, you are stuck if you don't have flowers). Interactive keys include full descriptions of every species in them, so it is sometimes possible to take even severely limited material and get a reliable identification (such as a twig with a leaf on it). They are also much faster and reliable because you can use only the characteristics that you are sure of and you can put characteristics into the program in any order.