The New Brunswick Museum herbarium houses about 115,000 specimens documenting the diversity, distributions, and habitats of plants and fungi in New Brunswick and other areas of eastern Canada. It is an active regional resource for research, education, and biodiversity conservation. It incorporates the 19th century collections of the Natural History Society of New Brunswick, including much of the material on which the first published catalogue (1879) of the provincial vascular flora was based. In recent decades, the NBM collections of bryophytes, lichens, and fungi have grown considerably; they include international material and exsiccatae. The cryptogams now represent more than two-thirds of the overall holdings of the herbarium.