Collaborative Research: Advancing the Extended Specimen Network: Curating and Digitizing the Sherwin Carlquist Collection

Among the notable “shoulders of giants” on which present-day botanists stand are those of Dr. Sherwin Carlquist (1930–2021). Carlquist leaves behind a rich legacy and significant collections resulting from over 30-years of important botanical research.

Over the course of his distinguished career, Carlquist published prolifically, with over 300 research papers covering such topics as plant anatomy and systematics, evolutionary and ecological theory, flower development, morphology, island biogeography, and taxonomy. As a researcher, Carlquist considered the biological elements within an environment as comprising a dynamic network.

This network informed his method for collecting specimens and the rich array of materials and records he generated through that practice. The Carlquist Collection, housed at the California Botanic Garden Herbarium (RSA) and the Botanical Research Institute of Texas Library (BRIT), collectively contains 191,789 objects, including herbarium specimens, wood specimens, plant material preserved in spirits, wood anatomy microscope slides, field photograph transparency slides, black and white photographs, and field collection notebooks.

A significant portion of the Carlquist Collection has never been curated or digitized, making much of the collection inaccessible. Further, some of the collection materials have faced varying degrees of deterioration owing to inadequate housing in non-archival materials. In a collaborative effort between RSA and BRIT, this project aims to curate and digitize these important collections and their associated data to provide long-term preservation and to create an Extended Specimen Network (ESN), wherein Carlquist’s specimens, field photographs, and collection notebooks will be linked to form an aggregated collection, thus creating limitless additional preparations and digital resources.

The project will facilitate immediate application to a suite of research areas, including systematic, wood anatomy, ecology, biogeography, island biology, phenology, plant conservation, history of science, plant humanities, and archival theory and practices. The Carlquist Collection will be publicly available via online data portals.

Held at the Herbarium at California Botanic Garden (RSA) and the Library at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT), the Sherwin Carlquist Collection encompasses more than 30-years of botanical field research comprising 30,770 biological collections and 161,019 archival objects. This project aims to (1) curate the Carlquist Collection for long-term preservation; (2) digitize and mobilize data for all collections materials held at both institutions; (3) link transcribed collection information, images, and metadata across all biological collections and archival objects; and (4) publish and make publicly available as an aggregated collection through online data portals, including iDigBio and GBIF.

This project represents a unique collaborative and interdisciplinary opportunity between natural history collections and archives to create one of the first Extended Specimen Networks (ESN) for a renowned American botanist and serves more broadly to establish a new paradigm for how natural history collections and archives communities envision, implement, and utilize ESN’s within and among their collections. Integral to the project are the activities that involve participation from students at different levels in their academic career.

The project will provide education, training, and capacity building for underserved youth and emerging professionals in a field that will greatly benefit from their participation. A workshop and symposium on ESN development are planned for the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections annual conference to provide training and resources to the collections community. Paired exhibits for the public and hosted at each institution will highlight the project.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.