Founded in 1864 by Daniel Cady Eaton from his personal library and plant collection, the Yale Herbarium is an internationally recognized repository with holdings of approximately 350,000 specimens from throughout the world. There are an estimated 5,000 type specimens. The collection is particularly rich in ferns, bryophytes and grasses, as well as in historically important materials from the early botanical collectors. In addition, it was the herbarium of record for the flora of southern New England from 1864 until 1955, when that function passed to the University of Connecticut at Storrs.

This dataset contains only specimens collected in the following regions (if they exist in this collection): Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, and Zambia.