The Ahart Herbarium: Collections, Databases, and Collecting for the Future
Thursday, February 20, 2025
7:00 – 8:00 PM (Via Zoom)
By Lawrence Janeway
Curator of the Ahart Herbarium at California State University, Chico
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The Ahart Herbarium at California State University Chico contains almost 130,000 specimens. Most of these specimens are vascular plants, with important holdings also of bryophytes, lichens and slime molds. These specimens form an invaluable record of plant diversity and distribution, especially for the northern California region. They are frequently used by students and researchers from throughout California and North America and sometimes beyond.
The presentation will be an overview of the collections at the Ahart Herbarium, with an introduction to how the herbarium stores and manages the different parts of the collection. We’ll explore the herbarium database, which is managed at the Consortium of California Herbaria portal in Symbiota. And we’ll discuss the importance of collecting plant specimens, how anyone can do it, and get some helpful hints on how you can ensure that what you collect is useful to the herbarium and researchers in general.
Lawrence Janeway obtained a B.A. in Botany from Humboldt State in 1993 (now Cal Poly Humboldt), and a M.S. in Botany from Chico State in 1991 working with the genus Carex. Although recently retired as a District Botanist on the Plumas National Forest, he continues as the Curator of the Ahart Herbarium, a position he has held since about 1992. As much as possible, Lawrence spends his “off” time getting into out-of-the-way places in northern California for general personal exploration and to fill plant presses with plant specimens for the Ahart Herbarium and other herbaria and researchers, and to help him make "Selected Plants of Northern California and Adjacent Nevada" a more useful and complete field guide for botanists in northern California.
