The application period for the 2026 awards is now open - See below for more information!
In 2020, we lost Dean William Taylor, a giant of the Northern California botanical community. He had an irrepressible enthusiasm for everything botanical, a genius for teaching, and an unparalleled understanding of the mechanisms driving plant speciation and distribution. His record of outstanding collections and discovery of new taxa speaks for itself. Dean was a champion of the unexplored botanical diversity of California, and frequently took the stage at our symposia to encourage people to collect specimens and work to define that diversity. In the absence of his electrifying speeches and reliable advice, we hope that the material support of the Dean W. Taylor Botanical Exploration Memorial Award will help a new generation of botanists fill his shoes.
The aim of the Dean W. Taylor Botanical Exploration Memorial Award is to cover costs associated with botanical exploration in Northern California. This award is open to all people with an interest in the native plants and wildland ecology of Northern California, including students, practicing botanists, land managers, and dedicated herbarium collectors. We encourage projects that echo Dean Taylor's goals of finding unknown botanical diversity in California, namely collecting in under-collected areas, work to explore the habitat and range of known taxa, and efforts to discover and define new taxa.
Awardees and their research for 2025 can be found on the Dean W. Taylor Botanical Exploration Memorial Award: Current Recipients page and the Past Recipients page. Abstracts of our 2025 awardees can be found in our 2025 Summer Newsletter.
2026 Application Information:
The application period is now open for 2026 awards. All applications should be submitted to NCB at ncbotanists@gmail.com no later than end of day on November 7, 2025.
Dean W. Taylor Award - 2026 Instructions