The Department of Botany at the Natural History Museum houses one of the world’s most important botanical collections, comprising around 5.25 million specimens from all biogeographical regions. The collection includes vascular plants, bryophytes, algae, diatoms, fungi, lichens and slime moulds, broadly representing the global diversity of plant life. The collections are of great historical and scientific significance, containing material dating back to the pre-Linnaean period, including specimens collected by naturalists between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of the collection has been digitised and made available online, with ongoing efforts to expand and improve data quality. Only records originating from South America are represented here.

Conditions for using the data

The Natural History Museum is committed to the principles of Open Access and Open Science, promoting open access to its research and data. To this end, it has launched the Data Portal (https://data.nhm.ac.uk), which makes its research and collections datasets available online, allowing anyone to explore, download and reuse the information for their own studies.

How to cite

Cite according to the guidelines of the Natural History Museum Data Portal (https://data.nhm.ac.uk/about/citation), including the dataset identifier and the date of access.

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