Shannon Asencio, who works at The New York Botanical Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, is the Project Coordinator for the Macrofungi Collection Consortium. This Garden-led project, involving institutions across the country, will result in a publicly accessible database and digitized images of several hundred thousand specimens of mushrooms and related fungi.
The beautiful gills of a specimen collected during the NAMA Foray in the Ozarks.
A couple of months ago, I attended the 2013 “foray” of the North American Mycological Association (NAMA), held at Shepherd of the Ozarks in northern Arkansas. I was there not only to participate in the search for mushrooms—mycology is the study of mushrooms and other fungi—but also to deliver a presentation on The New York Botanical Garden’s exciting new crowdsourcing initiative.
These annual forays are a way to record the mycological species that occur throughout North America. The collection data, photographs, and dried specimens are housed at the herbarium of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. These specimen records provide data about the distribution of macrofungi—mushrooms and other large fungi species—in North America and serve as a resource for additional studies, such as DNA research.
Shannon Asencio, who works at the Botanical Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, is the Project Coordinator for the Macrofungi Collection Consortium. This Garden-led project, involving institutions across the country, will result in a publicly accessible database and digitized images of several hundred thousand specimens of mushrooms and related fungi.
When I heard that Professor Sir Peter Crane was going to be giving a talk about the ginkgo tree, I jumped at the opportunity to attend. A noted botanist and conservationist, Professor Crane recently delivered an impassioned speech about this fascinating and, in many respects, enigmatic plant, which is the subject of his new book, Ginkgo: The Tree That Time Forgot.
He described his book as a scientific and cultural history that was inspired by the ginkgo at London’s Kew Gardens, which was planted in 1760. He told the audience at Sotheby’s auction house in Manhattan that he used to stop and admire the tree frequently when he was the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Professor Crane, whose work includes studies of plant fossils, conservation, and human uses of plants, is currently the Dean and Professor of Botany at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and he is also a Distinguished Counsellor to the Board of The New York Botanical Garden.
