Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History

Data & Research

Morgan’s collections have spurred great research achievements and will continue to spur more. At the Norris Center, we support both graduate and undergraduate research projects that incorporate Morgan’s collections. We encourage members from the broader community to use Morgan’s collections to answer specific local plant and insect questions. In addition, through our efforts to identify and digitize Morgan’s specimen records, we’re making Morgan’s collections data accessible to anyone in the world with a web connection.

Digitized Specimen Data

With help from several grants from the National Science Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the Norris Center has digitized tens of thousands of Morgan’s specimen records. These records are part of the Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) national database funded by the National Science Foundation. iDigBio aggregates data and images for millions of biological specimens for the research community, government agencies, students, educators, and the general public. Anyone with a web connection can access and query Morgan’s data.

Plant Data

The Norris Center has been digitizing Morgan’s plant collection data and uploading it to the Consortium of California Herbaria data portal (CCH2), which serves specimen occurrence records and images from 22 California universities, research stations, natural history collections, and botanical gardens.  CCH2 is also the primary repository for data produced by the California Phenology Thematic Collections Network , which is part of the broader iDigBio project.  TCNs consist of multiple institutions that digitize their information based on a particular research theme, such as impacts of climate change or biota of a region. Once digitized, data are easily accessed and available for other research and educational use. Each participating institution is primarily responsible for their data.  The CCH2 database is structured to make it easy to query millions of specimen records at once.

Follow these steps to query Morgan’s plant data:

  1. Navigate to the CCH2 home page.
  2. Select “Search Collections” in the Search drop-down menu.
  3. First de-select all contributing institutions
  4. Scroll down the list and select the “UCSC- Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History”
  5. Scroll back up to the top of the list and click on the “Search” button to the right of the list.
  6. Select specific information to perform queries.  For instance, type in “Morgan” in the Collector’s last name field and click the “List Display” or “Table Display” button.
  7. After a successful query, CCH2 organizes the retrieved data into 3 categories: Occurrence Records, Maps, and Species List. All three categories can be perused and/or downloaded as spreadsheets or KML files.

Insect Data

The Norris Center has been digitizing Morgan’s insect collection data and uploading it to the Symbiota Collections of Arthropods Network (SCAN), which serves specimen occurrence records and images from over 100 North American arthropod collections. SCAN is built on Symbiota, a web-based collections database system that is used for numerous other taxonomic data portals. SCAN is the primary repository for occurrence data produced by three continuing Thematic Collections Networks (TCNs) within the broader iDigBio project.  TCNs consist of multiple institutions that digitize their information based on a particular research theme, such as impacts of climate change or biota of a region. Once digitized, data are easily accessed and available for other research and educational use. Each participating institution is primarily responsible for their data.  The SCAN database is structured to make it easy to query millions of specimen records at once.

Follow these steps to query Morgan’s insect data:

  1. Navigate to the SCAN homepage
  2. Select “Search Collections” in the Search drop-down menu.
  3. First de-select all contributing institutions
  4. Scroll down the list and select the “Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History at University of California Santa Cruz”
  5. Scroll back up to the top of the list and click on the “Search” button to the right of the list.
  6. Select specific information to perform queries.  For instance, type in “Morgan” in the Collector’s last name field and click the search button.
  7. After a successful query, SCAN organizes the retrieved data into 3 categories: Occurrence Records, Maps, and Species List. All three categories can be perused and/or downloaded as spreadsheets or KML files.

Research Inspired by Randy Morgan

Chiara Cantos examined how community compostion of native pollinators has changed since the 1990’s and present day. 

Fana Scott investagated how the richness of invasive plants affected native pollinator richness and whether there were differences in pollinator richness between the 1990’s and present day.

Wendy Olvera looked at how the proportion of flies within the pollinator community changed between the 1990’s and present day. 

Natalie Reyes examined the number of native pollinator species on coast buckwheat and whether differences in plant richness between the 1990’s and present day explained trends in buckwheat use. 

Potential Future Research

Botanists Jim West and Dylan Neubauer recently published a list of potential research projects in the Scott Creek Watershed. Plants collected by Randy are listed as reference points against which future researchers should measure how plant populations and the watershed have changed. Read more here. 

Past Research

Graduate Student Research Projects

  • Dr. Adelia Barber (PhD UCSC Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) worked with Morgan himself to complete the field, greenhouse, and background research to describe a new species of clover, Trifolium piorkowskii.
  • Dr. Tara Cornelisse (PhD UCSC Environmental Studies) used Morgan’s insect collection data to study how best to manage and restore habitat for the federally endangered Ohlone Tiger Beetle. 
  • Dr. Juliet Oshiro (PhD UCSC Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) used Morgan’s plant collections and field notes to study how plant phenology has changed over the past 25 years. She found that as annual minimum temperatures increased, and precipitation decreased, plants began flowering earlier and stopped flowering earlier, especially near the coast. 
  • Dr. Angelita Ashbacher (PhD UCSC Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) used Morgan’s insect collections to study how pollinator networks have changed locally over the past 25 years.
  • Andy Kulikowski (PhD candidate, Environmental Studies) in 2018-19 identified many new taxa within the fly families of Syrphidae and Bombyliidae.

Undergraduate Student Research Projects

  • Cady Watts (Environmental Studies, 2015) created an exhibit about Morgan that is displayed in the main room of the Norris Center on campus.
  • Michelle Pastor (Environmental Studies, 2018) wrote a biography about Morgan and created 4 illustrations that depict his contributions Santa Cruz natural history and conservation.
  • Daniel Simoni (Environmental Studies, 2018) studied emergence patterns and plant associations with various bumblebee species (Bombus spp.). Daniel was able to closely track the behavior (emergence, reproduction and feeding) of male and females of multiple bumblebee species using Randy’s detailed data. 
  • Jesse Laine (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 2018) examined bumblebee community dynamics over the 10 years that Randy sampled bumblebees in Santa Cruz County. He looked at temporal changes in bee richness as well as changes in the network of plants visited by these important pollinators. 
  • Alexandra Ahmad (Environmental Studies, 2019) summarized how lycaenid butterfly diversity had changed over the 10 years that Morgan collected insects in Santa Cruz.
  • Jessica Correa (Environmental Studies, 2019) used the Morgan’s collection to create a field guide to local species in the Syrphidae, an important fly pollinator family.

Personal Projects

  • Revision of the genus Trifolium, with a number of new taxa described. See the Trifolium section for more information.
  • Revision of Leptosiphon parviflorus. His manifesto on this species is now stored at Stanford University,. 

Trifolium Revisions

The genus Trifolium contains approximately 300 species and belongs in Fabaceae, the legume family. Peanuts, alfalfa, soybeans, and other important bean plants are also in Fabaceae. Many species in the family are host to nitrogen-fixing bacteria, making them useful in farming and gardening as a cover crop and for green composting. Some Trifolium species serve as food plants for butterflies and moths and some provide fodder for livestock. The name Trifolium translates to “three leaves” in Latin because the palmate leaves generally have three distinct leaflets (trifoliate). This attribute is certainly part of what makes the clovers so distinct, along with the flowering heads of small, often colorful flowers. Although these plants are typically small in stature, the vibrant colors and unique patterns of their inflorescences and leaves draw one’s eye and curiosity as they did Morgan. 

As a genus brimming with intricacies, it is not a simple one to address. Those who have tried their hand at keying one of these clovers to species know sometimes it is no simple feat. One can end up completely stumped, and perhaps frustrated. Randall Morgan, the keen botanist he was, was aware of this and worked for years to uncover the complexities of this curious genus — one which seems to abound in “ironies, contrasts, parallels, etc., both intrinsic and taxonomic” — using morphological, biological, and genetic data. He was compelled to write a monograph, which he describes in the title as “a working inventory” — an incomplete, in-progress piece rather than a definitive text — focuses on the subsection Involucrarium. Annual and related perennial clovers native to western North America (one one species native to Chile) comprise this subsection of Trifolium. The paper was written with the hope to aid field botanists in identifying taxa in the group and to bring attention to unpublished taxa threatened by extinction. 

If you would like access to this content, send an email to both norris@ucsc.edu and cml@ucsc.edu expressing your interest.

Last modified: Sep 01, 2025