The new collection of more than 5,000 seaweed pressings highlights the importance of such archives for learning beyond artistic expression.

Using art to further science, the Smith Seaweed Ecology Lab at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography has introduced the new Ellen Browning Scripps Herbarium Collection, a digitized and physical collection of more than 5,000 seaweed pressings designed to teach and inspire the next generation of scientists, artists and innovators.

The collection, named for renowned La Jolla developer and avid seaweed collector Ellen Browning Scripps, showcases the scientific diversity and natural beauty of seaweeds through the pressings, which are important to understanding historical ecology and taxonomy and assessing biodiversity while documenting change.

Led by SIO postdoctoral scholar Adi Khen and SIO professor and marine ecologist Jennifer Smith, the collection boasts more than 300 different species of native and non-native seaweeds from Southern California. The physical pressings reside in herbarium cabinets in the Ted and Jean Scripps Marine Conservation and Technology Facility; the scanned pressings are available as a publicly-accessible digital archive through the UCSD Library’s Digital Collections and the Algae Herbarium Portal. 

A collage of a variety of scanned seaweed pressings. Credit: Ellen Browning Scripps Herbarium Collection

The seaweed pressings are scientifically useful but “are also beautiful pieces of art,” Khen said in a press release. “They have the power to tell us a lot about the past and the present, which could help us better inform the future.”

Each seaweed specimen is laid out on mounting paper and sandwiched in a wooden frame between layers of wax paper or mesh, blotting paper and cardboard. The seaweed is flattened, dried for about a week to preserve and labeled with its taxonomic name and other important information.