The mission of the Lichen Herbarium (UCR) is the documentation of the lichen and lichenicolous fungi mycota of California. The collection currently contains over 6000 collections, 4900 of which are from California. We regularly add from fifty to one hundred and fifty collections a week. Our online database is refreshed regularly.
A major emphasis of our study of California at this time is southern California and the Channel Islands. We currently have 1180 collections from Riverside County, for instance. We have begun expanding our collecting into central California and have 757 collections from San Luis Obispo County.The major part of collection are the work of two collectors: F.M. Reed from the early 20th century and Kerry Knudsen who is currently very actively collecting today. Other important collectors represented in the herbarium are James C. Lendemer and Rick Riefner, Jr.
The surveys of the Lichen Herbarium are supported by grants and contracts from the US Forest Service, California State Parks, the National Park Service, and the Irvine Foundation. We will welcome inquiries about surveys as well as consulting work.
For loans and information on collections, contact Kerry Knudsen, Lichen Curator, at Knudsen
ucr.edu.
The search page for the non-Filemaker web database for the lichens 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.
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. We wish to thank RSA for their help.