About the Consortium

Locations of CCH California Participants
The Consortium of California Herbaria is the organization that supports all herbaria in California. In 2003, the Consortium initially included only herbaria in the University of California system. It now includes records from 48 California institutions. Herbaria in California are encouraged to apply for membership. Herbaria located outside California are occasionally accepted as members as well. Data providers need to meet this set of minimum requirements. Current members of CCH are listed at ucjeps.berkeley.edu/consortium/participants.html.

The CCH began as a data aggregator for California vascular plant specimen data and that remains its primary purpose to date. Responding to requests from participants to display specimen data from all groups of plants and fungi, from all locations (including those outside California), we have developed a new portal. There are now two CCH portals and each has a special purpose.

The Consortium of California Herbaria Portal 1 (CCH1) serves as a gateway to information for California vascular plant specimens housed in herbaria, worldwide. Originally developed in 2003 around botanical collections from University of California herbaria, the Consortium has grown significantly and now contains over 2.2 million specimen records from over 50 participants throughout North America. Records from Herbaria outside North America will be added in future updates.

CCH1 is an updated version of the original CCH portal. CCH1 is a specialized portal for presenting highly curated specimen data about the California vascular flora, tightly linked to the active statewide flora project (the Jepson eFlora: http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/eflora/). It is restricted to vascular plant specimens of native and naturalized taxa from California. This portal includes all California vascular plants from CCH members, but also includes California specimen records from other sources worldwide. The Index of California Plants Names (ICPN) will continue to be developed to record details about each of the different categories of names for these taxa and will be used for both the Jepson eFlora and CCH1.

For more information about CCH1, see the following articles - A Powerful Resource for Plant Conservation Efforts The Consortium of California Herbaria Reaches Two Million Specimens, published in Fremontia (2016); UCR helps grow massive plant portal: Project makes a million specimens publicly available, published in Inside UCR (2020)

The Consortium of California Herbaria Portal 2 (CCH2) serves as a gateway to information for herbarium specimens housed by all participating CCH members. CCH2 is a general Symbiota portal for managing and presenting data from CCH members. This portal serves all specimen data from all participating CCH members and will be worldwide scope and have a broad taxonomic coverage of land plants, algae, and fungi. Unlike the original CCH database, some members will use CCH2 for data entry and collections management directly and they will be responsible for their own data quality control. In the next 4 years, CCH2 will add nearly a million images of specimens from California Herbaria. Additionally, the portal will capture phenological data: information about the timing of, e.g., flowering or fruiting.

CCH in the Scientific Literature

The CCH maintains a Google Scholar profile of publications since 2007 that have cited data from the CCH. This list is periodically updated and is not exhaustive, although we would like it to be! If you know of or have published an article citing data from the CCH that you would like to see on this list, please contact (Staci Markos).

Geographic Data

Georeferencing progress map (click for larger version)
Consortium georeferencing progress
 

The consortium also provides coordinate data (latitude/longitude) for as many California specimens as possible. Currently, specimens from all participating institutions are being georeferenced on a county-by-county basis. As of Dec 2021, ~1,882,000 records (over three quarters) include latitude and longitude. Georeferenced records returned from any Consortium search can be mapped directly from the Consortium accession results page.
See the CCH news page for detailed information about our most recent refresh.

CCH2 Georeferencing: a repository of California-centric georeferencing resources produced for the CAP TCN NSF Grant

RSABG Georeferencing: a repository of California-centric georeferencing resources maintained by Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden

The Yellow Flag Project: an effort to bring attention to incongruencies between georeferenced records and geographic ranges included in the Jepson eFlora.

Citation
Please cite data retrieved from the Consortium database: Data provided by the participants of the Consortium of California Herbaria (ucjeps.berkeley.edu/consortium/).

Data Use Policy
Curatorial Tools
Technical Information
Minimum Requirements for Participation


Consortium Contacts

Jason Alexander, Technical Editor    (jason_alexander@berkeley.edu)
Staci Markos, Administrative Co-Chair    (smarkos@berkeley.edu)
Jenn Yost, Administrative Co-Chair    (jyost@calpoly.edu)
Katie Pearson, Data Portal Consultant    (kdpearso@calpoly.edu)
Mare Nazaire, CCH representative for Southern California    (mnazaire@calbg.org)
Richard L. Moe, Emeritus Technical Editor    (rlmoe@berkeley.edu)


Acknowledgements

California Digital Library; initial funding (2003–2006)
National Science Foundation; planning meeting (2006)
USDA Forest Service; georeferencing (2006 & 2007:Tehama, Trinity, Shasta, and Siskiyou counties)
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; digitization of type specimens (2008–2013)
Global Biodiversity Information Facility; georeferencing records of non-native specimens (2008–2009)
Institute of Museum and Library Services (Museums for America program); databasing and georeferencing historical specimens collected in San Diego County (2005–2009).
National Science Foundation; databasing, georeferencing, and technical support (2010–2014), with an additional supplement in 2012.
National Science Foundation; imaging, databasing, georeferencing, scoring phenological traits, and technical support (2018–2022).


Please send questions or comments regarding the development and use of these pages to Jason Alexander (jason_alexander@berkeley.edu).

  Copyright © 2024 Regents of the University of California — Updated January 24, 2022