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Specimen data from the Consortium of California Herbarium

Welcome to the CCH2 data portal

California is home to over 6,000 plant species. The botanical diversity of the state is documented in herbarium collections housed at Universities, Field Stations, Museums, and Gardens. Plants are documented by field biologists and others who work with the Consortium of California Herbaria, whose members preserve and curate those plant specimens. The data are then leveraged by researchers to answer fundamental questions about plants in California.

This Symbiota portal is the primary database for California's herbaria to manage and share data about the plant specimens they curate. Currently over 60 collections share over 4 million plant records in this portal. Data managed here flows into other botanical resources like the Jepson eFlora, Calfora, iDigBio, and GBIF.

Funding for this portal was made possible in 2018 via NSF awards to create the California Phenology Thematic Collections Network (CAP-TCN; https://www.capturingcaliforniasflowers.org). This project created over 1 million images of specimens that can now be viewed in this portal, and more are added every day. To advance research of the California flora and the impacts of climate change, this project also developed phenological data for the specimens, and those data can be downloaded here.

This portal is managed by Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and the Symbiota Support Hub. For questions, please email help@symbiota.org.

Using the data:

Please refer to our Data Use Policy. The Consortium of California Herbaria asks that users not redistribute data obtained from this site. However, links or references to this site may be freely posted. If you have any questions about this policy, please contact Jenn Yost (jyost@calpoly.edu) and Katie Pearson (help@symbiota.org).

More California specimen data may be found at the following portals: