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he University of Michigan Herbarium was established in 1921 to bring together various botanical collections that had been developed almost from the time of the University's founding in Ann Arbor in 1837. From a start of some 27,000 cryptogams and 43,000 phanerogams, the Herbarium's collections have grown to include over 1.7 million specimens. The Herbarium is ranked seventh in the U.S. in total holdings and second among state-supported universities. The American Society of Plant Taxonomists has designated the Herbarium a National Resource Collection.

The Herbarium, a unit of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, operates under a Director appointed by the University President and responsible to the LS&A Dean. Financial support comes from two primary sources: annual allocations from the University's General Fund and sponsored research programs.

Facilities
The Herbarium occupies about 27,000 square feet in the Varsity Drive Building (former Stores Building) at the southern extreme of South Campus. Sixty percent of this space is devoted to the specimen-collection range; the remainder accommodates offices, data entry areas, a library (part of the University Library system), specimen-preparation areas, a class/conference room, a laboratory, and storage facilities.  All areas are air-conditioned, with humidity controls for the specimen collection range and the library, and are served with data ports linking to a 100Mb network.

Herbarium faculty also use the facilities of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in their research and teaching activities.

Collections at the Herbarium include significant holdings of all major plant groups representing floral communities all over the world. Particular strengths include Michigan and the Great Lakes region; vascular plants of Mexico, Iran, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia; bryophytes of tropical America; fungi of western North America; and marine algae of North America, the West Indies, and Oman. The approximate sizes of the various collections are as follows:

Algae: 96,000 specimens, including ca. 600 types.
Fungi: 290,000 specimens, including ca. 6,500 types.
Lichens: 56,600 specimens, including 745 types.
Bryophytes: 161,000 specimens, including 1,664 types.
Vascular plants: 1.1 million specimens, including ca. 12,000 types.

Library facilities include the University's outstanding botanical resources and the Herbarium's own collection of over 100,000 reprints relevant to its work. The reprint collection is completely cataloged according to author and subject matter.

The Herbarium's primary responsibilities are research in plant systematics, evolution, and geography, and maintenance and development of plant-specimen collections that provide data for and document such research. The unit is committed to and involved in teaching, research, and service activities centered on the botanical sciences.

The Herbarium is an important contributor to the program in systematic and evolutionary biology of the College's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Most Herbarium curators and research scientists also hold professional appointments in the Department; through these appointments they teach undergraduate and graduate courses and direct thesis research of graduate students (who also use the Herbarium's collections and facilities extensively in their research).

Research activities are centered on evolutionary studies of particular families and genera and on floristic studies of the Great Lakes Region and Latin America, particularly of Mexico. The Herbarium collections comprise a record of global plant diversity. They constitute a valuable resource for the Herbarium faculty as well as for researchers from around the world, who borrow specimens or visit the unit to examine materials in connection with studies in systematics, nomenclature, ecology, phytogeography, and history. Systematic botany pertains also to such fields as genetics, medicine, and zoology, and interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars from several fields is not uncommon.

In its Service capacity, the Herbarium provides assistance to other University departments and units, faculty and students at other universities, and the community at large. For example, curators have matched Herbarium specimens with charcoal remains unearthed by anthropologists to determine what primitive people ate. They have compared the contents of an elk's stomach microscopically with Herbarium samples to establish the animal's food choices for studies in conservation. Herbarium scientists have found the closest relatives to drug-producing mushrooms for the study of chemical pathways in pharmacology, and have answered numerous emergency inquiries from the Poison Control Center at University Hospitals. The Herbarium lends over 12,000 specimens each year to researchers at universities, government departments, and research centers throughout the world.