Searches in the Virtual Herbarium are by default word-based. The fastest searches are made by using whole words as the criteria. Wildcard characters can be used to find partial words, but search times will be significantly longer.
Use an asterisk (*) as a substitute for any number of characters in a word. (Example: "South*" in the Province/State field will return specimen records from "South Dakota," "South Carolina," etc.)
Use an exclamation mark before a word to specifically exclude that word from the search. (Example: "Boletus" in the Genus field and "!pallidus" in the Species field will return all records of Boletus except Boletus pallidus.)
Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases. Words not enclosed by quotation marks will be used to return records with all
of the words, but not necessarily in the order typed.
*The Scientific Name field searches the genus, species, infraspecies, and author abbreviations of a name.
Example 1: the search term "cinerea" finds specimens of Bovista cinerea and Mycena cinerea.
Example 2: the term "Massee" finds specimen records of numerous taxa described by George E. Massee.
Author abbreviations can be found using Harvard University Herbaria's Index of Botanists.