Consortium of California Herbaria

Study Extent

Publication of specimen records of vascular plants collected in the State of California. All included specimens are held in actively curated institutions.

Sampling

Specimen records are sent from participating herbaria to a central technical editor, who oversees the publication of records.

Quality Control

Prior to publication, all record sets are run through individually programmed "loaders" to put them into a common format and address possible errors and inconsistencies. This could result in record data being altered (e.g. correcting a misspelled county name), omitted (e.g. hiding a collection date recorded as year 1099), or the omission of an entire record (e.g. the taxon name is unrecognizable). All of these changes and editions are reported to the original contributing institution.

Method steps

1. Updated datasets are periodically received from participants, and reloaded into the CCH.

Vascular plants occuring in the State of California

1. Spermatophyta
2. Pteridophyta
3. Lycopodiophyta

The CCH provides record data of herbarium specimens collected within the State of California, primarily from California herbaria. Although the geographic boundaries are based on the political boundary of the state, records are curated and displayed based on the geographic subdivisions developed for The Jepson Manual: Vascular Plants of California (2012). The three bioregional provinces of California are the California Floristic Province (CA-FP), the Great Basin Province (GB) and the Desert Province (D). Of the georeferenced records in the CCH, approximately 81% are in CA-FP, 5% in GB, and 14% in D.