Planning Workshop for the Consortium of California Herbaria, March 18-20, 2007, Asilomar Conference Center, California

Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, Claremont CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award to Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden under the direction of Sula Vanderplank is to fund a workshop for the Consortium of California Herbaria, a collaboration of 13 herbaria from state and private institutions. The Consortium has established an online portal for some 800,000 specimens in 16 collections to provide information to users and facilitate annotation and loans of specimens for research, education, and resource management. The workshop has several aims. One is to assess potential for inclusion of other smaller herbaria and determine the status of these collections. This will enhance the coverage for the state's flora. Second, the workshop will develop long-term priorities of the California herbarium community and help bring data from smaller, unrepresented herbaria into the online resource. Sessions will be held on outreach to smaller collections, database needs and capabilities, standards development, and to develop plans to integrate activities with other online resources in the state and internationally. The workshop will have broader impacts on the educational planning of the institutions and in their planning to make botanical specimen information available to the public and state environmental managers.