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 over 70 California institutions.
Herbaria in California are encouraged to apply for membership. Herbaria located outside California are occasionally accepted as members as well.
The pre-2018 CCH portal served as a gateway to information for California-only specimens housed by all participating CCH members.
Now, the
Consortium of California Herbaria Portal 2 (CCH2) serves as the primary gateway to information for all specimens housed by all participating CCH members. CCH2 is a general Symbiota portal for managing and presenting data from CCH members. This portal is worldwide scope and has 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. CCH2 now has over 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.
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, this data aggregator portal has grown significantly and now contains over 3.2 million specimen records from over 270 participants throughout the world.
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. The Index of California Plants Names (ICPN) contains the primary synonymy database for plant names used for both the Jepson eFlora and CCH1.
For more information about the history of the original pre-2018 CCH portal, see the following articles -
A Powerful Resource for Plant Conservation Efforts
The Consortium of California Herbaria Reaches Two Million Specimens,
published in Fremontia (2016)
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).
CCH2 Georeferencing: a repository of California-centric georeferencing resources produced for the CAP TCN NSF Grant
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/).
Consortium Contacts
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).
