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The Vasculars Herbarium at UCR

The Herbarium at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) serves as an important source of information for the Southern California regional community of academic researchers, private biological consulting firms, farmers and other individuals involved with plants as a business, research topic, management concern, or just a personal interest.

The UCR herbarium currently houses over 224,000 vascular specimens from the United States (ca. 183,000 specimens: ca. 149,000 of those from CA) and Mexico (ca. 36,700) plus miscellaneous collections from other areas of the Western Hemisphere (as of April, 2014). It is a general collection, but with particularly strong holdings of Juniperus, Triticeae (B. L. Johnson & J. G. Waines collections of Triticum and Aegilops , plus allied genera), and Phaseolus. The herbarium is one of the strongest for the flora of Southern California and is also very strong in the flora of western Mexico.

For loans and information on collections, contact Andy Sanders, Curator, at Andrew.Sanders ucr.edu.

The Vasculars Web Database

The search page for the non-Filemaker web database for the vasculars collection at UCR assumes that the user wants to restrict the search to the entries whose characteristics matched the values entered into the fields provided on the page. For example, the entry of a collector's family name in the Collector's Last Name field and the word "foothills" in the Locality field followed by the clicking of the "Submit" button at the bottom of the page will get those specimens in the database whose collector has the family name entered and whose locality description contains the word "foothills." Those specimens without both will be excluded from the data presented.

For those of you would need a more sophisticated search, such as those specimens found in either Germany or Austria, you will need to use the Filemaker-hosted version of the lichens web database. Both database systems are capable of sophisticated searches. However, we do not have to do the programming for the Filemaker version. We do for the non-Filemaker version.

On the search page, the entries for many fields do not need to be fully spelled out. The beginning first letters will do if you do mind risking getting more than you were aiming for. Keep in mind that if you enter a date in "Search by Date" section, nothing should be entered into "Search by Date Range" section since the specific date will either logically limit the range to that date or preclude any selection of specimens. Similarly, if you enter a date range in the "Search by Date Range" section, nothing should be entered into the "Search by Date" section for the same reason.

In the Condensed presentation of the specimens' data, the up-pointed and down-pointed white triangles will sort the specimens based on the field name they surround. Clicking the Collector's name will get you all the specimens in the database collected by that collector. Clicking the Accession number of a specimen will get you an expanded presentation of the data. You can move from a condensed format to an expanded format and back again by clicking the relevant link at the top.

The database is encoded in unicode (specifically, UTF-8), the default character set for HTML 4.0+. The web pages rely on cascading style sheets for appearance and layout. The latest version of current web browsers, such as Opera, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer, will work well with it.

We will appreciate emails about corrections in the data that need to be made, any suggestions for improvements and comments you may have.

The basic design for this particular web database was derived from Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden Herbarium (RSA) web database (currently under servicing). We wish to thank RSA for their help.