Resources and Collections at Cal

No other campus in the West, and very few elsewhere, have research facilities and collections comparable to those used by faculty and students in Integrative Biology at Berkeley. Students in the department are offered access to nine major scientific facilities and collections.

Bio-data Acqusition, Analysis, Presentation and Exchange facility called the Bio-AAPE Center.

The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology is a research institute in evolutionary and ecological biology, and a repository for specimens and information on living vertebrates;

The Field Station for Behavioral Research supports behavioral studies of animals under natural and seminatural conditions;

The Gump Tropical Research Lab on Moorea, French Polynesia, supports research in marine, freshwater and terrestrial biology;

The Bodega Marine Laboratory located 65 miles north of Berkeley on a 32-acre refuge on the Pacific coast, has modern laboratories for research and teaching in marine biology

The Botanical Garden serves as an outdoor laboratory and houses research collections particularly rich in succulents and the wild flora of South America, Europe and Australia;

The University Herbarium keeps a reference-research collection on all parts of the plant kingdom, with an unusually comprehensive collection of seaweeds;

The Jepson Herbarium 's library and reference-research collection concentrates on California's vascular flora;

The Museum of Paleontology is a center for paleobiological studies and has one of the nation's largest collections of fossil microorganisms, invertebrates, vertebrates and plants

The Hastings Natural History Reservation , located 140 miles south of Berkeley in the upper Carmel Valley, is a 2000-acre facility for field research. Managed by the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, the Reservation offers facilities supporting a wide range of studies on plants and animals of the central coastal California foothills.

In addition to these resources and collections, related facilities available to Integrative Biology students and faculty are as diverse as the Human Paleontology Laboratory of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology and the Cancer Research Laboratory of Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology. Several smaller University field research stations are located in various areas of California, and many faculty and students have geographically widespread field sites, both domestic and international. Integrative Biology facilities also include extensive computer equipment and resources, featuring a wide graphics capability and access to the University mainframe computers; modern vivaria for ectothermic and endothermic animals, freshwater and saltwater aquaria, plant growth chambers, and microorganismic culture facilities, plus cold rooms and warm rooms for various purposes; photographic laboratories, darkrooms, staffed art rooms, machine and electronic shops, and an electron microscope facility.

Essential to every research and teaching institution is a world-class library system, and Berkeley's is one of the finest, distinguished not only by its vast holdings of new and recent publications, but also by its collections of rare books, manuscripts, and historical notes and artifacts relating to natural history and biology in general. The Biosciences Library receives more than 6,500 serials and houses 350,000 volumes, while Berkeley's main library contains over seven million volumes.