Celebrating 25 Years
Friends of the Chico State Herbarium
Annual Meeting and Special Presentation
Capturing California's Flowers:
Building Community, Capacity, and Discovery by Digitizing Herbarium Specimens
Katelin Pearson
Curator, Robert F. Hoover Herbarium
Project Manager, California Phenology TCN
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
View the annual meeting and special presentations below.
The California Phenology (CAP) Network (www.capturingcaliforniasflowers.org) was initially a NSF‐funded collaboration of 22 California herbaria that aimed to image 904,200 herbarium specimens and make them publicly available by 2022. This network has expanded to include six additional institutions and over 148,000 more specimens, for a total of over one million specimens.
The digitization of herbarium specimens has advanced our ability to understand how organisms respond to changing conditions. A digital record combined with high‐resolution images of herbarium specimens add a rich source of additional information regarding plant health, reproductive condition, and morphology. It has also provided the opportunity to expand education and outreach resources to expose a broader diversity of people to the rich resource of publicly accessible herbarium specimen data. This project brings California's herbaria together to build tremendous capacity for the botanical community and beyond.