Registry of Biodiversity Institutions, Collections and Databases: Institution

Description

The MGC Herbarium is owned by the University of Malaga and is part of the Central Research Support Services (SCAI). Founded in 1972, it has more than 100,000 herbarium vouchers that are divided into four collections: cormophytes (MGC / 94,000 vouchers); algae (MGC-Phyc / 5,500 vouchers); bryophytes (MGC-Bryof / 4,800 vouchers) and lichens (MGC-Lychen / 350 vouchers). The cormophyte collection is made up of specimens collected in the province of Malaga (53%), the rest of Andalusia and North Africa (29%) and other territories from Spain (11%). A small part (7%) are specimens from the rest of the world, represented by about 50 countries in Europe, Africa and South America. It includes more than 1.000 vouchers of ornamental plants, collected mainly from the city of Malaga. The algae collection (MGC-Phyc) is mainly made up by materials from the Iberian Mediterranean, the coasts of Andalusia and the Alboran Sea. It also conserves specimens from the Iberian Atlantic and from exotic countries such as Japan, Venezuela, Brazil and Antarctica. Some of the phycological materials are over 200 years old. The collections of bryophytes and lichens are mainly made up of specimens from the province of Malaga, mostly collected in the surroundings of the “Serranía de Ronda”. Annexed to the MGC Herbarium, there is a pollen collection with 2,000 samples of purified pollen from anemophilous and melitophilous species, both from ornamental plants and from rare and endemic species from eastern Andalusia. In addition, it maintains a series of 25,000 aerobiological preparations obtained from the atmosphere of Malaga from the spring of 1991 to the present, as well as from different dates of the atmosphere of Antequera, Estepona, Nerja (it also includes samples from Nerja Caves) , Vélez-Málaga, Ronda, Sierra de las Nieves, Münster and Tetuán.