Milwaukee Public Museum (MIL)

The MPM herbarium (MIL) began with a donation of 5,190 plant specimens in 1883 to the new City of Milwaukee Museum from the Wisconsin Natural History Society. This early collection has some of the oldest material in the herbarium, dating back to the 1850s and is heavily European in origin. Today the collections number around 250,000 specimens including ca. 70 type specimens with over 50% of the material from Wisconsin and another 30% from the rest of North America. The collections are divided into vascular (107,000 records) and nonvascular (17,000 records) plants with associated data digitized.

Contacts: Christopher Tyrrell, Collection Manager, tyrrell@mpm.edu
Collection Type: Preserved Specimens
Management: Data snapshot of local collection database
Last Update: 5 December 2023
IPT / DwC-A Source:
Digital Metadata: EML File
Collection Statistics
  • 123,970 specimen records
  • 29,665 (24%) georeferenced
  • 110,852 (89%) identified to species
  • 522 families
  • 3,119 genera
  • 13,050 species
  • 14,463 total taxa (including subsp. and var.)
Extra Statistics
Geographic Distribution
Click on the specimen record counts within the parenthesis to return the records for that term