Clare Loughran

Botanist

Clare Loughran is a botanist with over 10 years of professional experience in floristic studies, rare plant monitoring, seed banking, outplanting, and plant curation. She has been with Nomad Ecology since 2022, where she contributes her botanical expertise to floristic surveys, rare plant inventories, and rare plant population monitoring. She conducts post-fire monitoring, restoration monitoring, weed mapping, and vegetation mapping for various projects. She has worked on federal, state, and county lands through partnerships with government agencies, non-profit organizations and academic institutions, from Northern coastal California to the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

Prior to joining Nomad, Ms. Loughran worked as an assistant curator at UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley (UCBG), Ms. Loughran worked extensively with rare plants including monitoring and seed banking of numerous species. Since 2016, she has been involved with California Plant Rescue, a multi-institution collaborative whose mission is to seed bank rare plants of California. In support of this effort, Ms. Loughran coordinated with local botanists, government agencies, nonprofits and citizen scientists to survey for, as well as track populations and phenology of rare taxa targeted for seed banking. She ensured that these seed collections were accurately identified and met the highest standards of genetic conservation and kept detailed records.

Additional conservation projects that Ms. Loughran had key involvement with at UCBG were large scale grow outs of federally listed endangered species for outplantings and seed amplifications. Through UCBG’s partnership with the Amsinckia Recovery Implementation Team, she led three years of nursery grow outs and outplantings of the federally endangered large-flowered fiddleneck, Amsinckia grandiflora. Other native rare species that Ms. Loughran has had experience with growing in the nursery for conservation projects include Polygonum hickmanii, Lupinus constanci, Delphinium luteum, Delphinium bakeri, and several species of rare Clarkia spp. from across the state.

Ms. Loughran received a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Horticulture and Urban Forestry with an emphasis in Biodiversity and Restoration from the University of California at Davis.