The Herbarium has amassed a unique collection of African plant specimens sourced from specimen exchange and various research projects. Led by two CADSS students, Morgan Thompkins and Williams Toriola, our African plants digitization project is part of a nationwide effort funded by the National Science Foundation to make these resources more accessible to researchers globally. As of April 2025, the Herbarium has located, cataloged, digitized, and shared over 1,000 specimens onto the African Plants Portal database. Our students find this process to be deeply collaborative, as they even work with students outside of the sphere of botany to help translate common names in different languages. By digitizing these previously uncataloged African plant specimens, the Herbarium has helped make these specimens more readily accessible for students, professors, and researchers worldwide. One of the students involved in our African plants digitization project is Morgan Thompkins, a 4th year Molecular and Medical Microbiology major. Her love for plants and curiosity regarding African flora was a driving force behind involvement in this project. Morgan’s knowledge of various languages and her family’s background in farming has also made her well equipped to translate specimen labels. Learning about the diverse varieties of African plants and their many uses has been one of the highlights of her experience with this digitization project. For those curious about learning more about plants or getting involved, Morgan recommends dropping by the Herbarium and reaching out. 

In collaboration with Reserve Manager Suzanne Olyarnik and Research Coordinator Jackie Sones, we are digitizing and imaging the Peter G. Connors Herbarium at Bodega Marine Reserve (BMR) Read more about the BMR collection here: https://ucnrs.org/bodega-herbarium-named-to-honor-former-reserve-manager/

Spanning southern California, southwestern Nevada into Arizona and Utah, the Mojave Desert is one of the most floristically biodiverse regions in the United States. For the past 28 years, James André, Tasha La Doux, and their collaborators at the UC Granite Mountains Desert Research Center (GMDRC) have worked on an inventory of Mojave Desert plant species. In the process, the botanists collected over 60,000 specimens and discovered 235 new taxa. As the GMDRC herbarium nears its capacity, the UC Davis Herbarium agreed to accession a set of their Mojave Desert specimens. Funded by the State of California and California Institute for Biodiversity, the Collections Rapid Rescue Grant has allowed our Herbarium to accept and process 1,775 unmounted plant specimens. These specimens have been a welcome addition to our collection, which previously lacked a comprehensive representation of Southern California plants. 

Several students are processing these specimens: mounting the specimens on herbarium paper, adding a barcode and accession stamp, imaging them, and finally tying the images to the label information in our online specimen database. By joining this project, these students have the opportunity to learn first-hand about the Mojave Desert’s diverse variety of plant species while also gaining unique hands-on skills.