Collecting History: A Botanical Snapshot of The Fairfield Osborn Preserve

Student: Tessa Thompson

Faculty Mentor: Richard Whitkus

Biology/Geography, Environment & Planning

College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts/College of Science, Technology, and Business

The collection and preservation of plants for the advancement of scientific study benefits scientists. The collection and preservation of history, culture, and stories benefit many. The accessibility to both benefits all. Herbariums have been used to preserve plants from a given area as they are represented at the time of collection for long-term study in the form of dried and pressed specimens. With a greater interest in the integration of the humanities in science, how can herbariums be used to merge the disciplines? This project grapples with the potential addition of stories, art, and written testimony, both cultural and historical, in providing important context and enriching the herbarium collection. The Fairfield Osborn Preserve, located on Sonoma Mountain and currently managed by SSU's Center for Environmental Inquiry, has a diverse history of land use and occupation represented by the diverse plant presence. The herbarium project captured locations, photos, and specimens to catalog the current plant presence in 2024 - 2025. Along with samples of plant specimens, stories, poetry, art, testimonies, and history were collected to capture the unique element of human relations with the land at the time the plants were collected. The result of this project, which is still ongoing, is a digitized identification book of known species in their various forms, a book of digitized dried herbarium specimens, and a book of humanities.