Humboldt State University students and staff recently completed a botanical database which, linked with a statewide project, holds a wealth of information and possibilities throughout the state.

The Humboldt State University Vascular Plant Herbarium celebrated the final digitization of its 73,000-plant collection on Friday. The project links HSU’s collection with others around the state and provides previously unattainable access and cross-referencing.

Collections Manager Robin Bencie said the project took 5,000 hours of student labor over the last three years.

”It was one of those projects, in the beginning it seems so huge, almost undoable,” Bencie said.

Bencie said the HSU herbarium has been operating for nearly 50 years and has the largest plant collection in the California State University system.

”We just have a lot of specimens from our area that aren’t duplicated anywhere else,” Bencie said. “It makes our collection really valuable.”

The digitization project means taking labels from the collection and entering them into a massive database, which then links with the Consortium of California Herbaria.

HSU Herbarium Director Michael Mesler said that the work didn’t end at digitization — herbarium staff then had to proofread each entry.

”It’s amazing,” Mesler said. “We had great people.”

The labels show when and where a plant was collected, including the season and elevation. It’s also searchable by these criteria, a huge step up from the alphabetical-by-species listing that the collection previously maintained.

”It has really exponentially given us a lot of ways to access the information in our collection,” Bencie said.

The project was paid for by a $125,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

”The fact that we got the grant speaks volumes to how important the collection is,” Bencie said.

The herbarium’s collaboration with other collections allows academic researchers and other agencies to look up plant information from around California.

Brent Mishler, director of the University and Jepson Herbaria at University of California, Berkeley, helped found the consortium in 2003 with help from a grant from the California Digital Library.

Originally, the consortium was limited to UC schools, but Mishler said they realized that it could easily incorporate collections from the CSU schools and private groups like the California Academy of Sciences.

”It’s a way smaller institutions can participate in a really big effort,” Mishler said.

Mishler said the collection helps teachers who want to identify plants in certain regions before field trips and determine the range of certain species.

He said it also helps private companies determine what species are on their property when managing and developing land, and helps farmers track invasive species.

”Farmers are quite attuned to weeds,” Mishler said.

It also helps global scientific research.

”One really important use was using the Consortium of California Herbaria to look at the flowering times of the same species across history.”

Mishler said phenology — essentially the study of seasonality of organisms — is an increasingly common way of tracking climate change.

A recent study using herbaria data shows that the California poppy is blooming several weeks earlier than it was in the 1950s.

”There is a pretty scary trend toward a longer growing season,” Mishler said. “In a dry, Mediterranean climate, that’s not so good news.”

He also said it gives an image of the state of original California flora.

Mishler said that walking around the state now gives an inaccurate portrait of the original, untouched state of the ecosystem.

”You really have to start inside the herbaria,” Mishler said.

The botany department also received a grant to retrace the footsteps of Joseph Prince Tracy, a local title company employee who logged more than 50,000 specimens into the collection during the 1930s and 1940s.

Mesler said he will be retracing Tracy’s steps near the Trinity Summit area and comparing today’s flora which has survived heavy grazing and fires.

”It’s really just a chance to see if things have changed,” Mesler said.

Info box:

Visit the HSU Vascular Plant Herbarium database online at http://www.humboldt.edu/herbarium.

Grant Scott-Goforth can be reached at 441-0514 or gscott-goforth@times-standard.com.