Collections Data - Seed Plants

Flowering plants and gymnosperms comprise this grouping.  The herbarium holds approximately 2.5 million accessioned specimens with over 40,000 types ranking it fifth in the nation.

Representation is worldwide but its strength lies in the Neotropics. This is credited to the many floristic projects and collection-oriented research programs that have been an integral part of the department since its inception. Especially rich are holdings in the neotropical families Rubiaceae, Asteraceae, Palmae, Piperaceae, and Solanaceae.  The Central American material is overall one of the world's finest single collections with special strengths in Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. The South American collections are important with special strengths in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. A good representation in North American taxa is found, especially for Missouri and Illinois.  In addition the Field Museum curates an extensive collection of approximately 2000 dried fruits, large seeds, bark and other plant parts that generally are not accommodated on herbarium specimens. The gymnosperm collection consists of approximately 12,000 collections, 1000 cones and 41 types. There is good representation of Gnetaceae, Ephedraceae, Cycadaceae, and Pinaceae with the bulk of the Pinaceae from the United States and Mexico

Digitization efforts in the flowering plant collection are ongoing, including: data entry of core fields (taxon, country, latitude/longitude, date collected, collector, and collection number); and imaging of specimens. The complete catalogued portion of the collection is searchable by various fields, including taxon collector, locality, and date. A total of 461,000 collections are currently available on the Field Museum website.

These efforts were made possible with the support of the NSF Grants [DBI-0447285, TCN Collaborative 1403071] Mellon Foundation and Grainger Foundation

For copyright, data usage and citation information please refer to the Field Museum Data Norms and Considerations.

For loans or special requests, corrections, general inquiries, images, suggestions, please email Christine Niezgoda at cniezgoda(at)fieldmuseum.org