Botany — The Yale Herbarium

Divisional Collections

The Yale Herbarium in the Yale Peabody Museum’s Division of Botany comprises about 350,000 specimens, mainly from North America, especially New England. However, it also holds collections from Mexico and Central America, South America, Europe and Asia, and a fewer number of specimens from Africa and Australasia. The strength of the collections is in pteridophytes, bryophytes and grasses, thanks to the work of curators Daniel Cady Eaton (1864–1895), Alexander Evans (1895–1947) and John Reeder (1947–1968). It was the herbarium of record for the flora of southern New England from 1864 until 1955, when that function passed to the University of Connecticut at Storrs.

Plant Collection Techniques [PDF 70K]

Policy on the Destructive Sampling of Herbarium Specimens [PDF 64K]

The Yale Peabody Museum’s collections are available to legitimate researchers for scholarly use. Loans are issued to responsible individuals at established institutions. Loans and access to the collection can be arranged through the Collections Manager.

Systematic Arrangement

The Yale Herbarium systematic arrangement reflects our knowledge of plant phylogeny based on both morphological and molecular data. It is mainly based on the APG (Angiosperm Phylogeny Group 2003) ordinal classification, with some modifications along the phylogenetic tree. Great effort is taken to keep the system up-to-date.

Geographic Arrangement

The geographic arrangement of the Division’s holdings is as follows:

Dark blue — The Connecticut Botanical Society collection
Light blue — Connecticut
Tan — Canada and USA
Yellow — Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean
Orange — South America
Brown — Europe and Temperate Asia
Green — Tropical Asia, Australasia and the Pacific
Pink — Africa
Red — All type specimens

Database Projects

The Division started early in the summer of 2004 to create a database of the Yale Herbarium collections. At the moment only the Fenn Flora (1,100 records) is All Yale Peabody Museum collection data is in the process of migrating to KE EMu, the Museum’s new collection management system.

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