University of California, Santa Barbara (Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration, University of California, Santa Barbara)

The Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration (CCBER) will improve the curation, digitization, and accessibility of a newly organized collection of the Seaweeds of the Pacific Coast of North America, composed of approximately 10,000 specimens collected from an area ranging from the Bering Sea to Baja California. CCBER project staff, student interns. and volunteers will focus on 1) curating, imaging, databasing, and georeferencing the specimens; 2) verifying the identifications of specimens; 3) freely disseminating the collection information using online databases; and 4) organizing two workshops on seaweed diversity and identification broadly targeting scientists, curators, and the public. Upon completion of this project, the entire collection will be available for study in the herbarium and openly available online to researchers and the public.