Earlier this month, Drs. Jim Hogue and Paul Wilson attended a conference of museum and herbarium curators who are publishing information about their specimens online. CSUN’s herbarium is one of a number of California herbaria that have recently received funding from the National Science Foundation to further this effort.
Students paid from the grant will be imaging all of our specimens over the next year. The images, combined with label information that Hogue has been geo-referencing and databasing for years, will be available from the portal of the Consortium of California Herbaria and from many apps that ingest data from the portal. Data from all herbaria collectively come together to give the fullest account of the geographic ranges of species, their flowering and fruiting times, and how this corresponds with changing climates.