The California Phenology Network: Building capacity for sharing specimen-based phenological data

Millions of herbarium specimens being imaged in large-scale digitization initiatives can provide rich phenological data because specimens provide snapshots of plant status at specified times and places. The California Phenology Network—a digitization project funded by the NSF’s ADBC program—is empowering phenological data capture from herbarium specimens by developing a standardized angiosperm scoring schema. This schema is aligned with Darwin Core and mapped to the Plant Phenology Ontology, enabling linkage of specimen-based data to observation-based data. Specimen-based phenological data can now be quickly created, stored, and accessed via the network’s data portal (http://www.cch2.org).