The Future of Catalina's Herbarium

Catalina Herbarium THE FUTURE OF THE

As we look into the future of botany, one important step is digitizing the herbarium on Catalina. The Catalina herbarium contains 3,678 specimen records of vascular plants representing 726 species and 889 total taxa, including specimens of subspecies and varieties a century old. Providing online access of those specimens via the Consortium of California Herbaria (CCH) will make visuals of our Island species available to botanists and hobbyists around the world.

“It basically lets you do from your desktop what used to require extensive travel,” said Conservancy Botanist and Native Plant Manager Seth Kauppinen. “Finding out whether a given species actually occurs somewhere or making a species list used to be a herculean task. Now, essentially, you can search all the significant herbaria in California in one place.”

Digitizing will be valuable for Catalina’s herbarium not only for the value it will represent to botanists, but also to preserve the specimens themselves. Herbarium specimens are delicate; vulnerable to deterioration from age, insects, improper handling and building disasters such as fire.

“It digitizes a resource and makes it available to the general public. You can’t just knock on the door of a herbarium and say you’d like to look at plants, but now you can log in and see specimens that are 200 years old,” he added. “It freezes a snapshot of the collection at this point in time.”

The Conservancy has purchased the necessary specialty scanner for the digitization project and plans to begin the time-consuming process this year. The CCH2 portal is managed by UC Berkeley, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and Michael Simpson of San Diego State University, who has been key in advising Catalina on this project. View the current collections at CCH2.org. 11