Located in Northern California, the Shasta-Trinity and Klamath National Forests are home to a diverse range of flora. Since the 1980s, botanists in the region have been maintaining reference collections of the plants found during their surveys, including moss and lichen. Many of these plants are rare or endemic, meaning that they cannot be found outside of these forests. Phacelia damnationensis, for example, is a rare endemic herb named after Damnation Pass. Surprisingly, we’ve found an unnamed P. damnationensis specimen in our collection from 2010, before this species was officially first described in 2022. 

In 2021, the Monument Fire spread across the Shasta-Trinity National Forest area, forcing botanist Lusetta Sims to evacuate her collection of specimens to our Herbarium in UC Davis. Now, our student employees are working to mount, transcribe, and image these plant specimens. By creating an online backup, we can help to preserve this crucial specimen data and make it more accessible to researchers. Currently, this data has already been used in the datasets of several studies on biodiversity and phylogeny.