UC Riverside’s herbarium is helping create an unprecedented resource for scientists studying how climate change is affecting California’s plants. The herbarium has joined a consortium of 28 other herbaria, universities, research stations, natural history collections and botanical gardens digitizing their plant collections. By 2022, they will have built a free public database featuring images and...

UC Riverside’s herbarium, established over 60 years ago, is an irreplaceable library of plant specimens. Now, a $900,000 bequest from its founder Frank Vasek and his wife Maxine will ensure the resource remains available to many generations of future plant scientists, and that it receives needed repairs and reorganization. Vasek, who started the herbarium with...