Mary Carver Hall Herbarium

About the Herbarium

The Mary Carver Hall Herbarium houses over 25,000 plant and lichen specimens. Most of the collection includes specimens from Northern Utah, and some specimens date from over 100 years ago. The herbarium also includes specimens from across North America and other regions of the globe. This diversity of dried and pressed plant specimens provides a window into the past and present flora of the region and our world allowing us to understand plant variation and our changing environment as well as address our biodiversity crisis. Most of the specimens in the Mary Carver Hall Herbarium are vascular plants, and we continue to digitize these and make them available online at the Intermountain Region Herbarium Network.

In addition to vascular plants, there are over 2,000 moss specimens that were collected in the 1950s by LeRoy Behling. The Behling collection has representatives of every moss species known in Utah at the time. The moss collection is being digitized and is archived with the Consortium of North American Bryophyte Herbaria. The herbarium's lichen collection is digitally archived at the Consortium of North American Lichen Herbaria. Specimens collected by John Gustave Lind, the first science faculty member at what would eventually become Weber State University, and Louis F. Moench, the University's first president, helped establish the tradition of botany at Weber State University. These founding collections were moved to the University Archives in 2018.

Visitors and Volunteers Welcome!

Our goal is that you better understand the flora of Northern Utah and will examine the plants in our collection from other areas. Volunteers can serve important roles by mounting new specimens, digitizing our collection, and helping to identify our unknown specimens. The collection continues to grow with new specimens added by faculty, alumni, and exchange programs with other herbaria. We gladly receive new collections from botanists and other plant enthusiasts.