Abstract: Herbarium specimens have been collected on university campuses throughout their histories, making them unique areas of interest for using herbarium specimens to study global and local floristic patterns over time. Nestled in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, the land that UCLA occupies was originally coastal sage scrub and oak woodland, which are represented by our campus’s two remnant natural areas, Sage Hill (“Faculty Hill”) and Stone Creek Canyon. We manually curated a digital checklist using publicly available specimen records through the Consortium of California Herbaria (CCH2) Data Portal. Our checklist consists of 217 taxa from 55 families and includes over 580 specimens that have been collected on the Westwood Campus since January of 1930. These specimens are best represented by two major pulses in collection intensity throughout the early 1930s and throughout the 1950s. We use these specimens to highlight changes in native and naturalized species diversity during a century of rapid urbanization and land use development in Los Angeles. [Last update 2022]
