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Remarkable Collector Round-Up

12/21/2021

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Each completed Notes from Nature expedition or transcription project uncovers historical treasures in the annals of botanical exploration. Each specimen has a story to tell, and every collector could be the subject of their own tome, much less a blog post. Here we highlight a few of our favorite people and plants from the most recent expedition of specimens from the UCLA herbarium.
Ynes Mexia
Though her botanical career did not start until she was 55, Mexia was a prolific and highly influential botanist of the West Coast and beyond​--one of the few women in the male-dominated scientific world in the early 1900s. The specimen to the right was collected by Mexia on one of her early trips to Mexico. Mexia earned funding for and struck out on many expeditions across the Americas. A more comprehensive description of Mexia's spectacular endeavors can be found in the blog post linked below from the National Parks Service.
Check it out!
See Mexia's Specimens in CCH2
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Ira Waddell Clokey
Like many historic collectors, Ira Clokey's day job was not in botany. Clokey was a mining engineer from Decatur, Illinois who studied at University of Illinois and Harvard. Clokey collected in Mexico, Nevada, California, Colorado, and elsewhere. His specimens in the latest Notes from Nature expedition (under the name "I.W. Clokey") originated from Colorado in the 1920s (like the fleabane shown on the left) and Nevada in the late 1930s. Having lost his personal herbarium collection in a fire in 1912, Clokey persisted in his botanical exploration and collection. He produced a flora of the Charleston Mountains in Nevada and took several trips to the California Channel Islands. Over 40 taxa have been named in his honor, including the rare Clokey's catchfly (Silene clokeyi) and Clokey's fleabane (Erigeron clokeyi).
See Clokey's Specimens in CCH2
Carl Clawson Epling
Lastly, you cannot peruse the collection of the UCLA Herbarium without coming across specimens from Carl Clawson Epling (sometimes C.E. Epling or just "C.E."). Unlike Mexia and Clokey, Epling was a career botanist from the beginning. After a brief stint in the military during World War I, Epling dedicated himself to the study and teaching of botany, working for Oregon State College, the California Department of Agriculture, and Washington University before landing at UC Los Angeles in 1924. From there, he threw himself into systematics and taxonomy, and he remains well-known for his work on the mint family (Lamiaceae). His curiosity led him to study genetics later in his career, but he never lost his interest in botany, and he had thousands of collections to show for it.
See Epling's Specimens in CCH2
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​References
  • https://www.nps.gov/people/ynes-mexia.htm
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ynes_Mexia
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Waddell_Clokey
  • https://www.islapedia.com/index.php?title=CLOKEY,_Ira_Waddell
  • http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/chronob/EPLI1894.htm
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Epling
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When does that plant flower? Now you can find out!

12/9/2021

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After three years of gathering phenological data from herbarium specimens, the Consortium of California Herbaria's CCH2 portal now includes phenological scorings for over 1.6 million herbarium specimens (more info about our methods here). Now, we're excited to introduce a new tool for visualizing these data.
You can now view phenological data for a given taxon aggregated across specimens in the portal. In other words, you can see when, on average, a taxon is budding, flowering, or fruiting. The phenological data are displayed as carefully labeled graphs. You can see how many specimens were included in the count and when the data were analyzed. The graphs are generated on the fly, meaning that as more specimens are scored for their phenological status, they will be automatically added to the graphs.
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Shown below is an example of the taxon page for baby blue eyes, Nemophila menziesii, in CCH2. The flowering traits are displayed in the Traits Plots tab. You can switch between the different types of plot by clicking one of the icons at the top of the window, and you can view plots for other traits by scrolling down.
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The taxon pages in CCH2 are still under construction—we would like to see more thorough descriptions from published treatments, as well as more field images—but the addition of these phenological data represent a significant and celebrated advance in the availability of these data for end users.
To find the phenological data for your favorite taxon, conduct a search in the portal through the Search Collections tab, clicking List Display to view your options. Then, in the search results, click the name of the taxon on of the records. If the taxon is an angiosperm, you'll likely find a load of data aggregated and displayed on the Traits Plots page.
This tool was developed due to the hard work of Dr. Chris Tyrrell, and we are very grateful for his efforts! Chris designed the code in such a way that it can be used to visualize any time-related traits that have been coded in a Symbiota portal. The code has been integrated into the main Symbiota code and can be integrated into other portals as desired.
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This project made possible by National Science Foundation Award 1802312.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.


Poppy images courtesy of Matt Ritter

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