The Extended Specimen Network — Sherwin Carlquist ESN

From a single specimen to a connected network

The Extended Specimen Network (ESN) concept expands a physical specimen — a pressed plant on a herbarium sheet, a wood block in a xylarium — into a network of linked digital resources. Each layer extends the specimen with new kinds of information, from its direct digital surrogate out to derived knowledge like distributions, descriptions, and trait data.

The diagram below shows which extensions of the framework are presently represented in the Sherwin Carlquist ESN. Hover any bubble to see what it means and whether it lives in the network today.

Represented in the Carlquist ESN

Physical Specimens RSA Herbarium & RSA Xylarium (California Botanic Garden); Carlquist Collection at BRIT/FWBG.
Digital Specimen Records & Media Specimen records and imagery via the CCH2 portal (RSA · RSA-Wood).
Field Notes Notebooks & correspondence in the Carlquist Collection at BRIT/FWBG.
Field Images Digitized photographs via the Portal to Texas History.
Descriptions, Traits & Distributions Documented across 343 publications. Browse via the Publications Explorer or the Zenodo dataset.

Part of the broader framework

Isotope Samples Not currently part of the network.
Morphometric Data Many quantitative measurements appear in Carlquist's published wood-anatomy work but are not yet aggregated as a discrete dataset.
Gene Sequences Not currently part of the network.
Phylogenies Not currently aggregated as data, though Carlquist's work informed phylogenetic study of many groups.
Interactions & Protection Status Not currently part of the network.