About the herbarium search map

The herbarium record search map was originally created to provide a way to search herbarium records in Washington when the server hosting the Web site of the University of Washington's Burke Herbarium — as well as that of the Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria (CPNWH) — was off-line for an extended period of time in 2022-2023.

The database behind the map has since been expanded to include more than 2.5 million records from publicly available databases of vascular plants, including the entire CPNWH and Oregon State University herbarium specimen collections. Non-specimen observations and photos from OregonFlora are available as well. Data from northern California (above 37° latitude) comes from Jepson/UC Berkeley and the Consortium of California Herbaria. Specimen records from some other non-Pacific Northwest herbaria are included thanks to GBIF.org: UNLV, BYU, Intermountain Herbarium (USU), New York Botanical Garden, the Canadian Museum of Nature, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

You can also optionally add iNaturalist "research grade" observations to your search; as of January 2025, this adds another 5.5 million potential records in the area covered.

Citations for all of these data sources are listed at the bottom of this page.

Search queries

You can search using the Latin/scientific name of a species, variety/subspecies, genus, or family; you can search for multiple taxa by entering a comma-separated list. But keep in mind that searching for a family or large genus can get messy and slow unless you're zoomed into a small area; and there's a limit to how many markers can be displayed on the map at once.

If you want to exclude certain species from the search results, include a piece of its name preceded by a hyphen in the search query. For example, to see all of the Lilium records EXCEPT those of Lilium columbianum, search for "Lilium -columbianum" — or just "Lilium -colum", because partial matches work too. Similarly, you could find all of the members of the lily famly except Lilium itself by searching for "Liliaceae -Lilium".

Symbols on the map

If your search returns a single taxon, all the markers on the map will be the same color. Each marker represents one or more specimens at a particular location; larger markers contain more than one record. (Which means there are usually fewer markers than records, in case you're wondering about the numeric discrepancies that sometimes seem to appear.)

If the results include more than one taxon, each will be given its own color. When two different taxa share the same location on the map, they will appear as a "clump" of different-colored markers.

Normal specimen records are circles; records whose location is obscured or uncertain are squares; iNaturalist observations (if requested) are diamonds; other non-specimen records (observations or photos) are triangles.

You can click on the markers to see more details. If a Web page is available with more details about the specimen, the catalog number will be a link to that page. (The italicized taxon name at the top of the info bubble is a link to WildflowerSearch.org, where you can find further links to many different sources.)

Citations

(And a big thank you to David Giblin and John Haskins of the University of Washington for providing a backup copy of the CPNWH data despite the server crash.)