UC Davis Center for Plant Diversity

Give Day has officially begun! Donate to our campaign today to support training students in crucial skills like herbarium curation, plant identification, and much more 🌱

Visit the link below to make a donation before 5 PM on Saturday!

giveto.ucdavis.edu/campaigns/73141/donations/new?a=10086614&designation=centerforplantdiversitytrainingfund&tc=77988&amt=100.00

Have you heard about our African plants digitization project? 🌿

Led by two CADSS students, Morgan and Williams, this project is part of a nationwide effort to catalog African plant specimens and make them more accessible to researchers globally. Pictured above is Morgan holding a euphorbia specimen from Madagascar.

As of April 2025, the Herbarium has located, cataloged, digitized, and shared over 1,000 specimens onto the African Plants Portal database!

To read more about this project, you can read its updated description on our website under the “Current Projects” section.

Our sister institution, the Botanical Conservatory, is participating in Give Day this year to raise funds to secure their financial independence and future. You can donate as little as $5 to demonstrate your support of the astonishing plant biodiversity their greenhouses contain!

The link to support them is now in our bio!

Reviewing some California grass specimens before a few of our students go out and do some fieldwork collecting Tuctoria greenei this Thursday at Vina Plains Preserve in Chico!

UC Davis Herbarium in campus news!

A Botanist's Dream: Herbarium Houses 300,000 Specimens | Roots of UC Davis Facility Date Back More Than a Century

https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/botanists-dream-herbarium-houses-300000-specimens

The Davis Botanical Society invites you to "BARK: A story of how bark forms and how time changes California's iconic trees" a talk by Matthew Gilbert.

Join us Wednesday, on May 8th from 7-8pm at the Davis Public Library in the Blanchard Room. Followed by refreshments and good company afterwards.

We hope to see you there! For more info, call the CPD at (530)752-1091.

Today our Give Day Challenge ends at 5 pm. We are raising funds for two new dissecting microscopes. Why do we need these? If you've looked at the world magnified you would know...optical magnification opens up a whole new way of looking at things! Here at CPD we mostly look at plants. Scopes help us see the details we need to answer your questions about plants. Here's an example of what I'm talking about: the photo here is of a stylish planting of rushes (Juncus) outside the Mondavi center. Slender green sticks with small brown blobs on the end. But! Look through a scope (second image) and those blobs are perfect little flowers with green, red, white striped corollas, yellow anthers and fuzzy pink stigmas. Without good magnification, you miss the show!

runs from noon tomorrow through 5 pm Saturday. Please support the herbarium! We need one more gift on this page (https://giveday.ucdavis.edu/giving-day/85663/donate?des=617225&dept=85668) to meet our challenge donation.

Our goal is to purchase special microscopes for the plant ID room. These scopes get used every day. This morning Shawna Martinez (retired botany professor Sierra College & herbarium volunteer) and B’Elanna Pho (Plant Sciences major) used one to identify toxic plants for a UC Cooperative Extension Advisor.

is upon us and this year the Center for Plant Diversity herbarium is participating at the following page: https://giveday.ucdavis.edu/giving-day/85663/donate?des=617225&dept=85668

Our fundraising goal is to replace two deteriorating boom-stand dissecting microscopes in the June McCaskill Plant Identification Room.

We were thrilled to receive a $5,000 challenge gift which gets us almost halfway to the quoted cost of two very good quality scopes.

A donation of any size between now and 5 pm on April 20th will help us down the road to meet our challenge & ultimately make a big difference for the important plant identification services, research and plant identification teaching that these scopes facilitate.

In this photo from winter quarter, students Britney Solomon and Marco Iboshi use boom-stand microscopes to identify plants on mounted herbarium sheets during their internship-for-credit course.

Shawna Martinez stopped by the Center for Plant Diversity this week with a preview copy of the gorgeous new wildflower guide to California.

Here she is in the herbarium workroom, a proud editor-mama!

Published by Timber Press, it is available here:

https://www.cnps.org/news-releases/new-book-wildflowers-of-california-unveils-a-colorful-guide-to-the-states-native-blooms-37911

Center for Plant Diversity Students Contribute to CA Conservation Science:

UCD senior Stephen Shacoski and UCD Class of 2023 graduate Ana Vershoor (now a botanist with ICF Inc.) present a poster on their contribution to the California Plant Rescue project (caplantrescue.org) at the Northern California Botanists Symposium, Chico, CA on January 8-10, 2024.