Meet Scientists Informally at Café Scientifique
Posted in Exhibitions, Science, The Edible Garden on June 15 2010, by Plant Talk
Discuss Research, Learn About Plant World in Casual Setting
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James S. Miller, Ph.D., is Dean and Vice President for Science and Rupert Barneby Curator for Botanical Science. |
During The Edible Garden, which opens this weekend and runs through October 17, visitors will have the opportunity to gather with some of the Botanical Garden’s scientists in a casual setting known as Café Scientifique. Begun in Leeds, England, in 1998, Café Scientifique is an informal meeting that brings together the public and scientists to discuss science in familiar terms.
Today the Café Scientifique idea has spread well beyond the borders of the United Kingdom. The Garden has presented these in the past, and this summer and fall will host 18 such events over four weekends, with the first set scheduled this Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. both days in the Garden Cafe.
Garden research staff, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students will talk about the research and conservation they pursue worldwide—from Latin America to Micronesia and our own backyard—and share with those who attend a greater understanding of the plant world and the efforts under way to conserve plant diversity. They will discuss a wide variety of research topics, such as the exploration of poorly known regions to discover, describe, and name new species of plants; how various plant groups are related and their evolutionary history; and the genetic basic for why plants have different structural features.
This is a wonderful opportunity to interact with botanists and to better understand why their work is so very important.
I will be presenting on Sunday, June 20, at 11 a.m. on plant systematics and conservation.
Many of the researchers at The New York Botanical Garden study plant systematics, which involves reviewing the diversity of a variety of plant groups. As botanists, we travel to specific field locations to see live plants in natural settings and then collect and preserve specimens for later study.
Each of these collections includes dried, preserved plants or parts of plants, and a specimen label with information about when and where the plant was collected, the name of the collectors, and general information about the appearance of the plant and the setting in which it grew. These specimens are then stored collectively in the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, with 7.3 million specimens, the largest in the Western Hemisphere and among the four largest in the world.
These herbarium specimens, and the information associated with them, support many types of research, including basic plant systematics. By reviewing the general morphological features on herbarium specimens, botanists can ask questions about specific plant groups, for example: How many species of maples are there and how are they related to one another?
Information about where each collection was made allows botanists to map and understand the distribution, and to some extent the abundance, of each species. This information allows us to identify which species are restricted in range and, therefore, of possible conservation concern.
Collections-based institutions have a responsibility to use this information to inform conservation efforts and to identify those species that most desperately need our attention to ensure their survival. The Garden’s Plants at Risk program is using specimen data to identify threatened plant species in the West Indies. This information will be invaluable for land managers and conservationists concerned with protecting Caribbean plant species diversity.
