The purpose of this digital resource is to facilitate research using the Lord Fairfax Community College Herbarium (LFCC).
LFCC contains 12,046 herbarium specimens and 16 notebooks containing over 4000 pages of notes about the collection and accessioning of its specimens. LFCC was founded in 1974 by Professor Robert Simpson at the Middletown campus of Lord Fairfax Community College in Frederick County, Virginia. The collection grew rapidly during the Atlas of the Virginia Flora collection campaigns of the the 1970's and 1980's and focuses on the vascular flora of the Commonwealth's northern Ridge and Valley physiographic province. Its hand-written notebook pages extend the scientific and historic value of the collection because they frequently have more detailed locality and habitat descriptions than reported by the labels of the herbarium specimens themselves. In 2019, LFCC was transferred to the herbarium of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia following the retirement of Professor Simpson. For further reading about LFCC, see Weeks, A. (2020) A new life for Lord Fairfax Community College herbarium (LFCC). The Vasculum 15 (2): 8 – 12. Lord Fairfax Community College was renamed Laurel Ridge Community College in 2021.
This digital resource contains images of the collection and accession notebook pages that are indexed to the digitized LFCC herbarium specimens, their label metadata and the URL's of their high-resolution images. Notebooks 1-16 may be viewed in their entirety in the "Browse notebooks" tab. Indexed notebook pages, per herbarium specimen, may be browsed in the "Browse specimens" tab as well as queried using the "Search" tab. Images and other metadata from the herbarium specimens derive from the SERNEC Symbiota database for LFCC. Approximately 10,000 of the collection and accession notebook entries are linked to LFCC herbarium specimens. The remaining ca. 2000 entries cannot be linked because specimens may be missing from the herbarium or specimen labels lack the data necessary to link them to records unequivocably.