Plants
The MNCH is a member of the California Consortium of Herbaria (CCH). As part of the CCH, the MNHC maintains an herbarium collection of approximately 6,500 fully cataloged vascular plant specimens, which can be searched online through the Jepson online interchange hosted at UC Berkeley. The collection focuses on Santa Cruz County plants, primarily collected by local naturalist Randall Morgan over the last 40 years. Morgan’s collecting especially concentrated on plants in rare habitats, such as coastal prairie, coastal dune, riparian, maritime chaparral, and sandhill chaparral. There are also extensive collections of the genera Trifolium, Arctostaphylos, and Piperia. The museum has approximately 3,000 additional collected specimens waiting to be processed. With the help of volunteers and interns from UCSC, the Santa Cruz Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, and the community, the museum processes and catalogs a few hundred plant specimens per quarter.
The MNHC is also working to develop a specimen and photographic voucher collection of the vascular plants of Landels-Hill Big Creek Reserve in Big Sur, California.