University of California Santa Barbara Lichen Collection (UCSB)

The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Herbarium has approximately 120,000 herbarium specimens of vascular plants, lichens, bryophytes, and marine macroalgae. The herbarium is housed at the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration on the campus of UCSB. The vascular plant collection consist mainly of specimens from Santa Barbara County, including the northern Channel Islands, with additional collections from San Luis Obispo, Kern, and Ventura Counties, the southern Sierra Nevada region, southern California, and northern Mexico. Special collections include the J. R. Haller pine collection (5,000 specimens), with emphasis on population-level sampling of many western North American pine species, and the Cornelius H. Muller oak collection, with ca. 7,000 specimens from the USA and Mexico. Also conserved in the herbarium are ca. 69,000 slide preparations and spirit collections of Vernon I. Cheadle and Katherine Esau. There are 43 type specimens of plants and marine macroalgae. Incorporated collections include the Santa Rosa Island Reserve (SCIR) herbarium (1,500) and the marine macroalgae of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History (1,035), which contains some of the earliest collections of California seaweeds. Greg Wahlert is the current collections manager. Taxonomy and nomenclature follow the second edition of the Jepson Manual (Baldwin et al., 2012). Financial assistance with digitization efforts is provided in part by the UCSB Coastal Fund.