California Botanic Garden Herbarium (CalBG-RSA)

The combined Herbarium of California Botanic Garden and Pomona College (RSA-POM) is a museum-quality collection of vascular plant specimens. With current holdings totaling over 1,250,000 specimens, the Herbarium is the third largest in California. The Herbarium is recognized throughout the world for its strength in documenting the diversity, distribution, variation, and ecology of more than 6500 species of flowering plants, conifers, and ferns in California, which constitutes nearly 50% of the total collection. The holdings from Southern California exceed 250,000 and are unsurpassed by any other herbarium. Approximately 95% of the collection is composed of mounted sheets and filed according to a standardized system of classification. Ancillary collections that augment the collection include a cone & fruit collection, wood collection, fluid preserved collection, and pollen and anatomy slide collection.
Contacts: Mare Nazaire, Administrative Curator, mnazaire@calbg.org
Collection Type: Preserved Specimens
Management: Data snapshot of local collection database
Last Update: 1 March 2024
Digital Metadata: EML File
Collection Statistics
  • 693,406 specimen records
  • 352,008 (51%) georeferenced
  • 264,988 (38%) with images (459,003 total images)
  • 1 GenBank genetic references
  • 671,710 (97%) identified to species
  • 379 families
  • 3,523 genera
  • 24,236 species
  • 32,878 total taxa (including subsp. and var.)
Extra Statistics