The lichen herbarium at the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, consists of a Norwegian herbarium (c. 110,000 specimens), a foreign herbarium (c. 200,000 specimens), a type herbarium (c. 1,100 specimens), and a collection of exsiccatae (c. 5,000 specimens).
The herbarium has important collections from Norway, Iceland, the Arctic (especially Greenland, Jan Mayen, Bear Island, Svalbard, and Novaya Zemlya), Macaronesia, and East Africa (especially Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda). The material includes, e.g., the collections of Mathias Numsen Blytt (1789-1862), Søren Christian Sommerfelt (1794-1838), Niels Green Moe (1812-1892), Johannes Musæus Norman (1823-1903; part), Bernt Lynge (1884-1942), Eilif Dahl (1916-1993), and Hildur Krog (1922-).
Computerization of the herbarium labels started in September 1994, and by September 2010, all Norwegian and c. 30,000 foreign specimens are recorded. Priority is given to specimens sent out on loan, type material, and Arctic and African material. The database runs on PC's under DOS, and the data are made available through GBIF-Norway to the data portal at GBIF, Artskart and NLD. Type material may also the queried through a special service.
To facilitate registration of floristic data, the herbarium runs a field note database (NXL) and a field inventory database. These services are in Norwegian, and the databases use UTM-coordinates (MGRS notation) for localization. On these pages, you may generate registration forms for use in the field, send completed forms to the databases, and perform simple queries. The data are regularily transferred to the three portals mentioned above.
We are happy to present the bibliography databases Recent Literature on Lichens (RLL, covering the period 1951 – today) and Mattick's Literature Index (1532 – 1950) in co-operation with its authors. The databases can be reached through a common search form.
The site also runs the web page for the International Association for Lichenologist's field meeting in Yunnan, 2002, and the abstract database of the 7th International Mycological Congress, Oslo, 2002.
A photo gallery contains thousans of photographs of hundreds Norwegian and foreign lichens species.
Staff: Dr. Einar Timdal (curator), cand. scient. Anne Molia (technician), and cand. scient. Siri Rui (technician).