California Academy of Sciences Receives $3.6 Million to Digitize Entire Botany Collections

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (January 28, 2025) — The California Academy of Sciences has received a $3.6 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to continue digitizing the Academy’s vast botany collections.

This new grant expands upon existing Moore Foundation funding that helped Academy researchers initiate a massive digitization project focused on California plant specimens. Academy scientists will now be able to digitize an additional 1.1 million botany specimens from around the world, expanding and bolstering the curation, accessibility, and public utility of its herbarium.

“There are very few large herbaria in the world that are fully digitized; it is incredible that the Academy’s extensive botany collections will now be among the ranks of other world-class herbaria, and that global audiences can access, study, and enjoy all our specimens,” said Assistant Curator of Botany and Howell Chair of Western North American Botany Dr. Sarah Jacobs. “We are grateful for the Moore Foundation’s continued support for this digitization project, which will one day introduce audiences to botany specimens from Madagascar, China, Galapagos, and beyond.”

“We are excited to see the Academy continue to digitize their expansive collections of plant specimens from across the globe,” said Heather Lindsay, program associate for the Moore Foundation’s San Francisco Bay Area: Informal Science Program. “This digitization, and the enduring work history of botanical research at the Academy, will help us gain a better understanding of biodiversity now and into the future.”

Before the initial digitization project started, a fraction of the Academy’s botany specimens were fully digitized (with high resolution images and transcribed label data, including location and species information). The Academy enlisted the help of Picturae, an international leader in preserving, managing, and enriching historical collections through digitization. Botany staff used Picturae’s state-of-the-art conveyor belt systems and technology to digitize California specimens ten times faster than before, imaging thousands of specimens daily. As of September 2024, all California specimens have been imaged by Picturae, closing out the first phase of the botany digitization project.

Digitizing the Academy’s natural history collections and making them more accessible to a global community of scientists, educators, and conservationists will accelerate biodiversity research during a time of rapid environmental change. In order to better predict how climate change will affect plant diversity, scientists need to know how to describe current diversity, understand where species have been found, and have estimates of their variety and abundance.

With an estimated 2.3 million botany specimens in total, the Academy’s herbarium is the largest collection in the western U.S. These specimens form critical baseline data and robust historical information that can inform benchmarking and guide conservation actions. Particularly as it expands digitization into international botany specimens, the Academy hopes increasing access to these collections will provide opportunities for a global audience—and especially for under-resourced communities—to explore specimens originating from all over the world.

Engagement with dedicated community scientists is a second and ongoing step on the path to complete botany collection digitization. In partnership with Zooniverse’s Notes from Nature project, the Academy’s “Plants to Pixels” community science project will continue to make newly digitized data of California and global botany specimens available online to a large community of people—including Academy herbarium staff, volunteers, and thousands of online community scientists—who can help add location data to complete each record. This type of online people-powered research, also known as community science, has been widely adopted by museums and large natural history collections to tackle the challenge of transcribing data from huge collections of images. Volunteers who participate in transcribing specimen data as part of the Plants to Pixels project between January 28 and February 28, 2025 will be eligible to win posters showcasing the beautiful biodiversity of the Bay Area.

Images available for press use here.