About Us

The NGBB Herbarium was founded in 2004 to document and record the plants grown at the Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanic Garden, in a small two-room building next to the office building. In March 2010, it was registered in the Index Herbariorum and received the code "NGBB". In the following years, the scope of the herbarium expanded with specimens collected during research expeditions.

In 2009, Dr. Füsun Ertuğ donated about 1,500 ethnobotanical specimens belonging to the Bodrum Useful Plants Research Herbarium. In 2014, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh Herbarium gifted a rare collection of specimens collected from Türkiye by P. H. Davis, the author of the "Flora of Turkey". From 2012, our herbarium became a hub for researchers and botanical artists within the Illustrated Flora of Türkiye Project.

In 2015, 93 lichen specimens collected from the eight islands forming the botanic garden formed the Lichen Collection. The same year, a new herbarium building equipped with a special ventilation system was constructed on Central Island. In 2020, the Carpology and Anatomy Collections were created, bringing our collections to their present form.

The NGBB Herbarium holds around 20,000 plant specimens. Specimens are grouped as ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms; within each group, families, genera, species and infraspecific taxa are arranged alphabetically. Herbaria are also valued for the type specimens they hold; according to NGBB records, the number of type specimens is 134.

Within the scope of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (2011–2020) Target I, we began work on building a virtual herbarium in 2020. As of 2022, the data and images of our specimens have been transferred to the web and our virtual herbarium has begun service.