UPCOMING CHANGES IN THE CONSORTIUM OF CALIFORNIA HERBARIA

Abstract

The Consortium of California Herbaria (CCH) began as a data aggregator for California vascular plant specimen data and that remains its primary purpose to date. From 2003-2017, the CCH grew in size to over 2.2 million specimen records from 36 institutions. In 2018, three new members of the CCH were added and this year four additional herbaria are preparing to join the CCH. This brings the current total members of CCH to around 43. 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 Symbiota portal (CCH2). With the addition of the new CCH2 Symbiota portal, there are now two CCH portals and each has a special purpose (see Table 1). The original CCH portal (http://ucjeps.berkeley. edu/consortium/) is not being retired. It is being repurposed and is now referred to as CCH1. CCH1 is a specialized portal for presenting highly curated specimen data about the California vascular flora and is tightly linked to Jepson eFlora (http://ucjeps. berkeley.edu/eflora/). It is restricted to vascular plant specimens of native and naturalized taxa from California. This portal will include California specimen records from many sources worldwide. The Index to California Plant Names (ICPN, http:// ucjeps.berkeley.edu/db/icpn/) will continue to be developed and will be used for both the Jepson eFlora and CCH1. The new CCH2 portal (http://cch2.org/portal/) is being developed as a general Symbiota portal, serving all specimen data from all participating CCH members. When complete, it will be worldwide in scope and have a broad taxonomic coverage of land plants, algae, lichens, and fungi. The development of this new portal has been funded by the California Phenology Thematic Collections Network (CAP-TCN). The CAP-TCN is made possible by the National Science Foundation Award (NSF Division of Biological Infrastructure, Award #1802312). This grant is funding the capture of images, label data, and phenological (i.e., flowering time) data from nearly 1 million herbarium specimens. These images and phenological data will increase our understanding of changes in flowering patterns over time, which is valuable to researchers studying climate change in California. Both portals are currently online and available to the public. However, not all member data in the original CCH1 are present in CCH2. Conversely, new records in CCH2 will not be found in CCH1 until it is completely converted into the new format. Changes and additions to each of these portals are expected to be complete by December 2019.