Jepson Herbarium: Workshops

In 1994, the Friends of the Jepson Herbarium began a program to provide educational opportunities for a broad audience of professional and amateur botanists. Today, the program continues to serve as a liaison between the scientific community and the public, a role we are dedicated to as we enter our 24th year of public programs. For 2018, the Jepson Workshop Series is proud to offer course offerings in botany, plant taxonomy, regional floras, ecology and more. Join us for another great year of learning about the flora of California!

To find out when your membership expires, check above your address on the most recent copy of The Jepson Globe, or call the herbarium for more information: 510-643-7008.

About Our Instructors

David Ackerly is a plant ecologist and Professor at UC Berkeley. His lab studies climate change impacts on biodiversity, particularly California native flora, and implications for future challenges in conservation and land management. David is the co-director for the Terrestrial Biodiversity and Climate Change Collaborative (tbc3.org), a partnership with the Dwight Center for Conservation Science at Pepperwood Preserve, focused on climate change and resource management in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the Principal Investigator and Director of an NSF NRT program: Environment and Society: Data Sciences for the 21st Century (DS421, 2015-2020), a program that brings together a diverse group of UC Berkeley graduate students to address interdisciplinary challenges related to global change. David also helps lead the Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology, which promotes integrative work addressing biotic impacts of global change.

Allyson Ayalon is the new Public Programs Coordinator for the Jepson Herbarium. She recently relocated to Berkeley from Davis, California, where she completed her B.S. in Plant Biology and M.S. in Horticulture & Agronomy with an emphasis in Public Horticulture and Curatorial Science. While in Davis she worked for both the UC Davis Arboretum & Public Garden and the UC Davis Center for Plant Diversity (herbarium), and as such she developed a love for both living and dead plant collections, respectively, and sharing them with the public. At UC Davis, she taught the lab components of courses on Plant Anatomy, Introduction to Environmental Horticulture, Trees of the Urban Forest, and California Floristics.

Bruce G. Baldwin is Curator of the Jepson Herbarium and Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley. Bruce received his Ph.D. in Botany at UC Davis in 1989. His research emphasizes systematics (including the use of biosystematic, molecular, and phylogenetic methods) of Californian vascular-plant groups, especially our native Compositae. He is Convening Editor of the Jepson Flora Project, which produced The Jepson Desert Manual (2002) and the second edition of The Jepson Manual.

Heath Bartosh is co‐founder and Senior Botanist of Nomad Ecology, based in Martinez, California, and is a Research Associate at the University and Jepson Herbaria at UC Berkeley. After graduating from Humboldt State University, Heath began his career as a professional botanist in 2002 and has been an earnest student of the California flora for the past 14 years. His general research interests are in California vascular plant floristics with a focus on distribution, soil and geologic relationships, endemism, regional and local rarity, and habitat conservation. At a more specific level, his primary interests are floristics of the North and South Coast Ranges (NCoR and SCoR) and fire-following annual plant species there. His research on post-fire floras focuses on the composition and duration of the eruptive dominance and subsequent fleeting abundance of annual plant species at regional scales within the California Coast Ranges. In 2009, he also became a member of the Rare Plant Program Committee at the state level of CNPS. His role on this committee is to ensure the rare plant program continues to develop current and accurate information on the distribution, ecology, and conservation status of California's rare and endangered plants, and help promote the use of this information to influence plant conservation in California.

Linda Beidleman has an M.S. in biology from Rice University. She is co-author of Plants of the San Francisco Bay Region and Plants of Rocky Mountain National Park. She has worked with the California Native Plant Society, especially as co-supervisor for the CNPS East Bay plant nursery. Linda has taught short flora and ornithology courses for the Rocky Mountain National Park and the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies.

Travis Columbus is a Research Scientist at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and Professor of Botany at the Claremont Graduate University. He has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where he worked on Bouteloua and related taxa. His current research focuses on the evolution and classification of the grass subfamily Chloridoideae.

Heather Constable is a GIS enthusiast, who has taught multiple workshops around the world in GIS, mapping, museum science and biodiversity informatics. She is currently the Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology Coordinator. Heather's publications, including her research on marine population genetics, can be found on Google Scholar.

Diane M. Erwin is the Senior Museum Scientist in charge of the University of California Museum of Paleontology fossil plant collections. She received her Ph.D. in Paleobotany from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Diane's research spans the Phanerozic, from studies that include work on early seed plants and their relatives, the early lycophytes, to her current interests looking at the systematics, evolutionary and biogeographical history, and paleoecology of western North American Cenozoic plants.

Ivo Duijnstee is an adjunct assistant professor in Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley and an assistant professor at the Department of Earth Sciences at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He teaches biological topics for geology students and vice versa. He mainly works on the (paleo)ecology of foraminifera, single-celled marine organisms whose shells easily fossilize, the reconstruction of paleoenvironments, and how the Earth system (the interacting biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, ice sheets and solid Earth) has functioned in the past.

Laurel Goldsmith received her undergraduate degree in botany from Humboldt State University. After graduating she worked as a consulting biologist with work focused on rare plant surveys, plant inventories, and vegetation mapping and as a research and restoration coordinator at the Dunes Units of the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge. She currently works as a biologist for Caltrans in Eureka, California.

Joyce Gross is a programmer for the UC Berkeley Natural History Museums, supporting CalPhotos, the Essig Museum of Entomology database, and other museum databases. In her free time, she hikes and travels to photograph insects. Her photos have been published in various books and magazines.

Terry Huffman has a Ph.D. in botany with research emphasis in wetland plant ecology and has been working as a wetland scientist for over 35 years. He has worked for the Army Corps of Engineers and as a private consultant. While with the Corps, he developed the definition of wetlands and criteria for the delineation methodology currently used by the Corps and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Javier Jauregui Lazo is a second year graduate student in the Mishler Lab at UC Berkeley. He came from Chile to start his botanical career at UC Davis, where he completed his Master's degree in Horticulture and Agronomy. Fascinated by the amazing diversity of land plants, he decided to pursue a doctoral degree at UC Berkeley to learn more about bryophytes in Mediterranean climates. At UC Davis and at UC Berkeley, he taught lab sections of Systematics and Evolution of Angiosperms, Vascular Plants, and Medical Ethnobotany classes.

Nick Jensen is currently a Ph.D candidate in Botany at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden/Claremont Graduate University. His research interests include biogeography, rare plant conservation, and biodiversity. His research projects include the flora of Tejon Ranch, threats to California’s rare plants, and evolutionary relationships in Streptanthus (jewelflowers). Nick has a B.S. in Environmental Horticulture from UC Davis and previously served as the Rare Plant Program Director for the California Native Plant Society. He has also worked as a botanist for the U.S. Forest Service, Chicago Botanic Garden, and in the private consulting industry.

Ingrid Jordon–Thaden is a Research Botanist, Lecturer, and Laboratory Manager at the University and Jepson Herbaria. Her 21 years of experience with botany allows her to provide this workshop with a solid foundation in plant identification. Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, she received a double B.S. in Horticulture and Chemistry at the University of Nebraska Lincoln (UNL), followed by her M.S. in Biology at UNL, and took a leap over the Atlantic to earn her PhD in Biology at the University of Heidelberg. After post-doctoral experience at University of Florida and Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, she is now continuing her research and teaching at University of California Berkeley. Her research in plant systematics uses phylogenetics, morphology, population genetics, comparative genomics, anatomy, cytology, and physiology to explore evolutionary processes in plants and speciation primarily in members of the Brassicaceae, particularly those found in alpine ecosystems in the Rocky Mountains and the Yukon. Ingrid is Genetics Section Chair for the Botanical Society of America and the Environmental and Public Policy Chair for the American Society of Plant Taxonomists. Her teaching experience includes courses in Phylogenetics and Population Genetics, Vascular Plant Systematics, Anatomy and Morphology of Plants, the Jepson workshop on Brassicaceae, and general botany courses in both the field and the lab throughout diverse habitats in the United States and in Europe. For more information, visit Ingird's web page at: jordonthadenbotany.weebly.com.

Ken Kellman is a Field Associate at the California Academy of Sciences who has been studying bryophytes since 1995. Ken has published a catalog of the mosses of Santa Cruz County, California, and is currently working on a catalog of the bryophytes of Monterey County. He is largely self-taught, which puts him in the position of understanding how to teach and encourage beginning bryologists.

Michelle S. Koo is the Biodiversity Informatics and GIS Staff Curator at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ), University of California at Berkeley. She now manages the Informatics Lab at MVZ, the MVZ Archives and the collections database with other staff curators, while collaborating on several informatics projects such as VertNet, AmphibiaWeb, and the Keck Informatic Engine through the Berkeley Initiative on Global Change Biology. Her current research includes mapping endemism hotspots and regions of rapid evolutionary diversification in terrestrial vertebrates of California, essentially applying spatial analysis to understanding the biogeography and phylogeography of vertebrates. She spent almost a decade conducting herpetological surveys in western USA for the California Academy of Sciences before coming to UC Berkeley.

Neal Kramer received his B.A. in Botany from UC Berkeley, and an M.S. in Forest Ecology from the University of Idaho. He is a consulting botanist with work focusing primarily on rare plant surveys, plant inventories, and vegetation mapping. For the past 7 years, he has worked with the Tejon Ranch Conservancy, conducting botanical studies to expand knowledge of the Tejon Ranch flora and better inform Ranch management decisions. Neal enjoys plant photography and has contributed more than 15,000 images to the CalPhotos database.

Cynthia Looy is a plant ecologist who investigates the response of Paleozoic plants and plant communities to environmental change during periods of mass extinction and deglaciation, and the possible evolutionary consequences. Her primary research is focused on several aspects of the end-Permian biotic crisis and its aftermath, and the transition from a glacial-dominated world to an ice-free one during the Late Carboniferous to the Middle Permian. Her studies strongly rely on an interdisciplinary approach combining quantitative palynological and paleobotanical data with organic geochemistry, isotope analysis, marine paleontology, biostratigraphy, ecology and plant physiology.

Isaac Marck is a Ph.D. student at the Jepson Herbarium, UC Berkeley. He is interested in the systematics and conservation of the California flora. Originally from Los Angeles, he has worked with universities, high schools, and the California Native Plant Society to raise awareness about the unappreciated and threatened biodiversity of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Kathy Ann Miller has loved seaweeds since her first phycology class in 1976 – at the Bodega Marine Laboratory! She was trained at UC Berkeley, receiving her B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in botany. She has extensive intertidal and subtidal field experience and is particularly devoted to the seaweed flora of California. She is the Curator of Algae at the University Herbarium at UC Berkeley.

Brent D. Mishler is Director of the University and Jepson Herbaria as well as professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, where he teaches systematics and plant diversity. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984. His research interests are in the systematics, evolution, and ecology of bryophytes, especially the diverse moss genus Tortula, as well as in the phylogeny of green plants and the theory of systematics.

Maynard Moe was raised from infancy in Yosemite Valley, received his B.A. and M.A. from Fresno State University and Ph.D. in Botany from UC Berkeley. Maynard is a (partially retired) professor of biology at California State University, Bakersfield. He has botanized and led field trips throughout California, especially in the Sierra and Mojave Desert regions. He has spent the last few decades in Kern County where he wrote a key to Twisselmann's Flora of Kern County, and published vascular plant floras of Fort Tejon and Tule Elk state parks. His primary interests are the floras of Kern County, the Sierra, and the desert regions of California.

Julie Kierstead Nelson has spent her career promoting the discovery, enjoyment, and conservation of the flora of the western United States. Since 1989 she has been Forest Botanist for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in far Northern California. Before that, she started the Berry Botanic Garden Seed Bank for Rare and Endangered Plants of the Pacific Northwest. Julie’s current focus is to encourage exploration and understanding of the Klamath Mountains flora. In recent years, she has collaborated on publishing several newly discovered plants of the Klamath Mountains, including Shasta huckleberry (Vaccinium shastense), Shasta maidenhair fern (Adiantum shastense), and Shasta fawn lily (Erythronium shastense). She instigated a taxonomic overhaul of the stonecrop Sedum section Gormania group, resulting so far in publication of Sedum citrinum and S. kiersteadiae; several other new taxa and a field guide to sedums and their relatives in California and Oregon will be published soon. Julie has contributed over 2,300 free use photos to CalPhotos, and many hundreds of voucher specimens from the Klamath and Cascade Ranges to California herbaria.

Peter Oboyski has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and is the Curatorial Supervisor of the Essig Museum of Entomology. He studies the evolution and biogeography of moths, butterflies, and other insects on the remote Pacific Islands of Hawaii and Tahiti.

Philip Rundel is professor of biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is co-author of Introduction to the Plant Life of Southern California: Coast to Foothills. He is also director of the Stunt Ranch Santa Monica Mountains Reserve and senior investigator in the center for Embedded Network Sensing at UCLA.

Kathy Schick received both her masters and doctorate in entomology from UC Davis. For over 30 years she has researched the systematics of tiny wasps (Cynipoidea) over half the species of which are found only in plant galls. She is a research associate at both the Essig Museum of Entomology at UC Berkeley and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Michael G. Simpson is a professor emeritus in the Department of Biology at San Diego State University and Curator of the SDSU Herbarium. He received his Ph.D. in botany from Duke University in 1983. He specializes in the phylogeny of monocots and Cryptantha and relatives of the Boraginaceae. At SDSU, he has taught Plant Systematics, Taxonomy of California Plants, and specialty courses. He is an author of Plant Systematics (Elsevier-Academic Press, 2nd edition 2010), Plant Collecting and Documentation Field Notebook (2013), and co-author of Checklist of the Vascular Plants of San Diego County (2014).

John L. Strother is in charge of Compositae (Asteraceae) in the University Herbarium (and curates composites in the Jepson Herbarium as well). He also participates in matters concerning curation of other seed-plant collections.

Else Vellinga is a mycologist who studies the diversity of parasol mushrooms worldwide. She was trained at the state herbarium in the Netherlands and has been living and mushrooming in California for the last 16 years. Her work has focused on describing the mushroom flora of California, and she has discovered over 20 new mushroom species in the state so far. She is currently involved in the digitization projects of the fungal collections of the UC Herbarium, as having occurrence data for mushrooms is the first step toward conservation.

Dana York received his M.S. from California State University, Fresno in Botany, and his B.S. in Forest/Natural Resource Management from Humboldt State University. He has worked on floristic and special-status species surveys throughout California and Oregon on both public and private lands. He has discovered new plants in the Oregon Cascade and Sierra Nevada ranges, Northern California, and Death Valley National Park. He was Death Valley's botanist for nearly five years. He currently works in Eureka, California, for Caltrans as an Environmental Unit Supervisor.