The Brigham Young Herbarium contains approximately 350,000 specimens, primarily from the state of Utah. The holdings of this herbarium probably constitute the world's best representation of the plants of this area. This collection has been used extensively for preparation of the Intermountain Flora and the Flora of Utah, and this herbarium is the primary resource for our understanding of the transition between the floras of the Rocky Mountains to the east and the Great Basin to the West. Research on the biogeography of the American West benefits greatly from this collection. Dr. Stanley Welsh, Curator of the Herbarium, has been responsible for the collection's steady growth over the past decades, and he now proposes to install a new storage system of movable "compatorized" herbarium cases. This improvement will support many years of continued growth of the collection. Natural history collections such as the Brigham Young Herbarium constitute the a valuable resource for understanding the diversity of life on earth. They are indispensable to research in many fields of science, including but not limited to systematic and evolutionary biology, ecology, biogeography, and conservation. The continued support and improvement of these collections will provide future generations of investigators with access to critical research resources.
