The UCSB Algae Herbarium is the largest collection of algae between UC Berkeley and San Diego. Greg Wahlert, the Shirley Tucker Curator of Biodiversity Collections and Botanical Research was awarded $111,847 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Museums for America program, to support a new Herbarium Technician to complete the digitization of the macroalgal collection. In addition, the UCSB Coastal Fund supported a major funding grant for field research on the diversity of macroalgae from Santa Rosa Island and the curation of the Seaweed collection. The Algae Herbarium contains approximately 8000 specimens starting with the collection by Charles L. Anderson and collaborators (1873-1889) which serves as the basis of the first published list of algae of California (Anderson 1891, 1893). The earliest specimens from the Santa Barbara region, collected by Lorenzo Yates (1902) and Donald Peattie in the 1930s and 1940s, are also part of the algal collection. CCBER's David Chapman and Jim Markham continue to contribute significantly to the collection. Jim Markham sits on the CCBER Director's Council and he is pictured here in the herbarium.
