Herbarium Curation

Sagehen uses volunteers to manage its collections, including our herbarium. Here are some useful documents to help you understand the principles and strategy.

IMPORTANT! Be scrupulous about your field and lab notes. Keep a lab journal and field notebook. Document everything you do! Your effort is wasted--or even destructive--if you (and others) cannot later figure out what you did.

Organization and Management

• Sagehen Herbarium Curation and Workflow, 2020
• Sagehen Herbarium Guidelines 
• Digital collection. Sagehen's herbarium vouchers have been digitized and are available online at CCH2.org. 
• Herbarium Collection Needs & Notes, 2020

https://www.capturingcaliforniasflowers.org/workflow--protocols.html

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Thanks to all our Sagehen Herbarium volunteers to date!

• Erica Krimmel: program development; collections organization; digitizing; herbarium expansion; volunteer management.
• Alex Gallandt: accessioning; mounting; collecting; updating taxonomy; reorganizing collection schema.
• Angele Carroll: plant mounting; voucher filing
• Hannah Johansson: accessioning assistance
• All the California Naturalists and Weed Warriors who have helped at plant mounting days! 

 

BioBlitz model

 Kaitlin Backlund organized Sagehen's first BioBlitz in 2015, and it was a great success, due to excellent planning. See more photos.

Kait has generously shared her management tools with us for the next event.

Volunteer Shift Schedule | Sagehen BioBlitz Guide

From Kaitlin:

Here is some info for a BioBlitz. Its a lot of work, but also a ton of fun. I recommend reading through items here. http://www.inaturalist.org/pages/bioblitz+guide

I relied heavily on the Nerds for Nature Guide and have attached their 10 Step Guide with modifications made for the 2015 Sagehen Blitz in green print. Also attached is the Volunteer Shift Schedule. The Sagehen Blitz was a highly managed event because it was held at a Field Station, but as you will see by looking at other Blitzs, there are a variety of formats. (I happened to use Nat Geo's Blitz at Hawaii's Volcano National Park as a template.) It is also worth noting that the BioBlitz Guide doesn't discuss liability etc.. which is something you should discuss with whoever you partner with to do a Blitz.Most groups or agencies that work with volunteers in the field have procedures in place for you to follow.

I hope this is helpful!

Sagehen Mammal Collection digitization project

A specimen label needing to be transcribed.

Sagehen is busy digitizing and curating our teaching collections to share with large data portals, creating new research and citizen science opportunities. With the advent of new technologies, like various isotopic and genetic sampling techniques, old collections are yielding important new information that informs research into changing environmental conditions. Here's one spectacular an unexpected example from Sagehen's visiting artists program. And another from our research program, where DNA from fur samples was compared with historic museum specimens to determine relatedness, and isotopes confirmed where the animal had been drinking its water.

At present, we need help digitizing the labels from our mammal collection. You can help out from home using the instructions found here.

UPDATE, 8-4-19: we have largely completed the first phase of this project. All animal skin records are now available to researchers and the public through CSVColl.org, a Symbiota portal. Select "Sagehen Creek Field Station (UC-Berkeley) - Mammals (SCFS-Mammals)". Complete transcribed label data is available here.

This project was completed thanks to the efforts of Erica Krimmel, Sagehen Collections Manager, and our amazing volunteers:

• Terry and Emily Gollub, Sagehen California Naturalist (specimen photography)
• Alexander and Robert Gallandt, Volunteers (label transcription)
• Kathy Mullen, Sagehen California Naturalist (label transcription)

We still need to accession our collections of bones, scat, hair and fish scale slides, so keep an eye out for announcements. If you would like to help right now, we have a Zooniverse project that needs your help identifying animals in camera trap photos.

iNaturalist Animal Track Project

Here's a great description of an iNaturalist project that you might like to participate in, or on which to model your own project.

iNaturalist assistance

iNaturalist is a fantastic platform for developing your own citizen science projects. Here are some great tutorials about power-using it. Even if you already use iNat, you'll probably learn some useful things here.

How to create an account...


iNaturalist: Creating an Account & Changing Account Settings from S Cadwell on Vimeo.

Adding a basic observation through the website, rather than with a smart-phone...


iNaturalist.org: adding an observation from S Cadwell on Vimeo.

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Got an account now? The following is a really rich and powerful video showing:

• What is iNaturalist and who uses its data?
• How to add an observation, 
• How to batch observations, 
• How to use iNaturalist as a field guide, 
• How to incorporate your Facebook and other social media photos in iNaturalist,
• How to invite other Facebook user photos to your project...

Turning your Facebook photos into ctizen-science observations with iNaturalist from iNaturalist on Vimeo.

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Once you are comfortable, you may want to learn how to set up your own project on iNaturalist...

Setting up your own citizen-science project with iNaturalist.org from iNaturalist on Vimeo.

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More iNaturalist video links here.