Funded by GGI-Gardens Awards Program, in partnership with United States Botanic Garden

Project Completed: 2024

Institution: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens

GGI Collection Internship at The Huntington

Project goal

The Huntington collections comprise over 25,000 taxa across the tree of life. Part of their mission is to increase access to collections for researchers and students around the globe. The GGBN is one important part of fulfilling that mission and interns funded by the GGI-Gardens Partner Award have been instrumental in creating and growing their biobanks. These biobanks currently only represent a small fraction of their living collections, but the foundation has been laid to continue to grow these resources.

Key achievements

The 2023 GGI-Gardens Partnership was used to help fund student intern, Annica Wu, from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. She came to The Huntington with much enthusiasm and a good deal of knowledge for some aspects of the biobanking process.

During her short time at the Huntington, Annica gained experience in several aspects of field botany and collections management. She learned to use the Huntington’s ArcGIS mapping system to identify and track taxa on the target list. Overall Annica made 48 plant collections from 33 families, two of which are new to GGBN and 47 genera, 46 of which are new to GGBN. From this set of candidate taxa Annica made tissue and herbarium collections and documented her progress. She refined the system of tracking her progress within the ArcGIS map, which will likely be a model for the Huntington’s collection protocol going forward.

Annica’s previous herbarium experience was a great asset as she was able to mount and database a backlog of GGBN vouchers in addition to her new collections. Additionally, Annica shared a number of valuable suggestions for improving the Huntington’s herbarium protocols and organization. Finally, Annica learned to extract DNA and add it to the Huntington’s DNA bank. This is the second year Huntington has been awarded a GGI-Garden’s Partnership, providing a budding botanist valuable and varied experience.

The Huntington is grateful to have received another round of funding from BGCI, GGI-Gardens, and the US Botanical Garden to support our GGBN internship position. This was another productive year of biobanking and a great learning experience for both Annica and the Botanical Garden.