80,000+ Herbarium Specimens Digitized, Now on Public Data Portal

By: Matt Guilliams, Ph.D., Tucker Systematist and Curator of the Clifton Smith Herbarium

Located on the east side of Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, across from its main entrance, the Pritzlaff Conservation Center serves as the central hub for the Garden’s conservation work. The basement of this fire-safe building is home to the Clifton Smith Herbarium, the Garden’s collection of dried plant specimens. This American Alliance of Museums (AAM) accredited collection is the result of decades of collection and recording work and is used by our team of scientists to better understand our natural world — and it is soon to be even more widely available.

Combined with the co-housed Lichenarium and Fungarium, there are a total of approximately 210,000 specimens in the Garden’s collection. This makes it the largest collection of preserved plant, lichen, and fungus specimens from California’s hyper-diverse central coast and Channel Islands.

Recently, we completed a four-year project to digitize over half of the Herbarium’s collection — more than 80,000 of approximately 155,000 plant specimens.

This is a high-resolution image of Sonoran maiden fern (Pelazoneuron puberulum var. sonorensis; Theypteridaceae), a beautiful but seldom-seen inhabitant of creeks and streams in the Santa Ynez Mountains. This species reaches the northwestern edge of its range in Santa Barbara County.

The Garden is among 22 California partner institutions who participated in the National Science Foundation–funded project “Capturing California’s Flowers: using digital images to investigate phenological [the timing of biological events] change in a biodiversity hotspot.”

The project was conducted under a novel data standard that was specifically developed for this project but deployable to similar efforts worldwide.

The digitized specimen data and images are now housed on a new, publicly accessible data portal (CCH2.org) for use by biodiversity and conservation scientists around the globe.

For the Garden’s part of this grant, we obtained highresolution digital images of a total 81,497 specimens, which took the better part of four years to complete. The grand total from all 22 participating institutions is more than 904,200 specimens.

In addition to the benefits to science and conservation, this project involved hundreds of students and other volunteers who received training and developed expertise in natural history collections. Some have turned this experience into employment in the field, including at the Garden. This is especially gratifying as 58% of project participants were women, and more than 16% were from groups that are traditionally underrepresented in STEM.

The project partners generated a massive dataset capable of addressing critical questions about the flora of California, a biodiversity hot spot that is experiencing rapid climate shifts. These data and images are critical resources for biodiversity scientists in their study of the world we live in.

Additional information about this project, such as protocols, educational resources, and our blog, can be found at CapturingCaliforniasFlowers.org.

Garden herbarium technicians Susana Delgadillo and Eli Balderas are hard at work creating high-resolution images of specimens for the National Science Foundation digitization project.