Dudley Herbarium


The Dudley Herbarium was the herbarium or plant specimen collection of the Stanford University Natural History Museum and the former Division of Systematic Biology of the Department of Biology, at Stanford University in California.

History

The collection was started by botanist William Russell Dudley, the head of the Stanford Botany Department from 1892 to 1911. LeRoy Abrams became curator in 1920.
In the early 1960s, Stanford Provost Frederick E. Terman made a decision to terminate support for the Division of Systematic Biology. Subsequently various subcollections were transferred to other institutions in 1968
The main vascular plant collection was eventually transferred, along with Stanford's Natural History Museum fish collections, to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. In 1976, the Dudley Herbarium had 850,000-specimens, which were merged with the 600,000 specimens of the California Academy Herbarium, on completion of what was at the time a state-of-the-art facility to house the collections and staff, funded mostly by a grant from the National Science Foundation.