En Tu Comunidad is a public affairs program on the Spanish-language network Unimas that serves the New York City metropolitan area. The show is hosted by Enrique Teuteló.
Enrique invited me on the show to talk about my research in ethnomedicine—specifically, the use of medicinal plants in Latino and Caribbean communities in New York City, especially within the community from the Dominican Republic—and how this research can help physicians establish a better relationship with their Spanish-speaking patients.
Read on for a short English summary of our conversation, plus the full video of the interview in Spanish.
Barbara Thiers, Vice President for Science Administration, Patricia K. Holmgren Director of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium
One of the most important projects underway at The New York Botanical Garden is the ongoing effort to make the preserved plant specimens in the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium available online. That means more than just taking high-resolution digital images of the plants. It also entails entering all of the information about the specimens, such as where they were collected, when, and by whom, into a searchable database.
Of the 7.4 million specimens now in the Steere Herbarium—the largest in the Western Hemisphere and one of the four largest in the world—Botanical Garden science staff have already digitized more than 2.3 million of them.
Why is this a big deal? Well, as more specimens become available online at the Steere Herbarium and elsewhere, plant scientists and other researchers will be able to compile massive amounts of data about Earth’s plant life for the first time.
The Huffington Post has published a piece by Dr. Barbara Thiers, the Garden’s Vice President for Science Adminstration and the Patricia K. Holmgren Director of the Steere Herbarium, in which she talks about one very important use for this newly available data: gaining a better understanding of the potential impact of climate change on ecosystems.
You can read more about the Garden’s digitization project here.
Internships may seem like a summer-only opportunity to gain exposure to a field and make a contribution to a project, but that’s not the case at The New York Botanical Garden’s Science Division. We have interns here during all four seasons, performing important work and learning plant science firsthand from our researchers.
One of our volunteer summer interns, Chelsea Fowler, a biology student at the University of Tampa, wrote about her recent experience working in the Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium on a project that is part of the effort to digitize the Steere Herbarium’s 7.4 million preserved plant specimens. This post is from the iDigBio Web site, a national resource for information about digitized natural history collections. Our thanks to the Florida Museum of Natural History, where the Web site is based, for permission to repost Chelsea’s story.
Roy E. Halling, Ph.D., is Curator of Mycology in The New York Botanical Garden’s Institute of Systematic Botany. Among his primary research interests is the bolete (or porcini) family of mushrooms, especially those found in Southeast Asia and Australia.
Boletus austroedulis
The true porcini mushroom is well-known as a prized edible mushroom. Boletus edulis, as it is known scientifically, has a common name in just about every country where it has been found. Steinpilz, cep, penny bun, king bolete, panza, prawdziwek, and pravi virganj are just a few. Often viewed as “wild crafted,” it can’t be cultivated and grown artificially; it is only found in nature.
Recently, we’ve learned more about the family lineage of this tasty fungus. By analyzing DNA gene sequences, my colleague Dr. Bryn Dentinger at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew identified two relatives that are species new to science. We and four other colleagues have just described these species in Mycologia (July/August 2014).
Scott A. Mori, Ph.D., is the Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Francisca Coelho is the Vivian and Edward Merrin Vice President for Glasshouses and Exhibitions.
Victoria amazonica in its native habitat along the Amazon River.
In a post on Plant Talk, Scott described the fascinating life cycle of the Amazon water lily. But how did this iconic Amazonian species receive its scientific name, and how did this popular late-summer attraction come to be cultivated so far from its native habitat at major botanical gardens such as The New York Botanical Garden?
The Amazon water lily was discovered by Eduard Friedrich Poeppig in Peru and, because he thought it was related to an eastern Asian water lily belonging to the genus Euryale, he named it Euryale amazonica in 1836. The species was rediscovered by the German botanist Robert Hermann Schomburgk on a botanical expedition supported by Great Britain to what was then known as British Guiana. Schomburgk shipped his detailed notes, drawings, and collections to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where John Lindley described the species as Victoria regia in 1837 in honor of Queen Victoria.
Lawrence M. Kelly, Ph.D., is Director of Graduate Studies at The New York Botanical Garden. His research focuses on the evolution and classification of flowering plants.
Developing fruit (ovary) at the center of a Yucca flower
Despite the year-round availability of most produce, few things say summer like a juicy, vine-ripened tomato from the garden or a produce stand. You can slice them, dice them, and use them in stews, sauces, and salads. They’re one of the most versatile of vegetables. Or are they?
Is a tomato a vegetable, as most people think it is, or is it really a fruit? In general terms, fruits are usually sweet and vegetables are savory. Fruits are usually eaten as dessert, and vegetables as a main course. Fruits are often succulent and edible when raw. More technical dictionary definitions recognize a fruit as an edible reproductive body of a plant. In contrast, vegetables are usually defined much more broadly, for example as an edible part of a plant, or they are defined by example, such as in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, which cites cabbages, beans, and potatoes.
Carrots and their wild relatives, Queen Anne’s Lace, are a familiar part of our life, whether at the green-grocer or along summer-time roadsides. But the carrot family (Umbelliferae) is a huge group of nearly 4,000 species, including many familiar sources of food, spices, and medicines, such as parsnips, celery, parsley, fennel, dill, caraway, cilantro, coriander, and anise. Most are found in northern temperate areas of Eurasia and North America, but there is a smaller subgroup of the carrot family centered in the Andean region of South America, extending from the alpine páramos of Colombia and Venezuela to the cold, windswept grasslands of Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile and Argentina.
Annie Virnig is no stranger to tackling formidable challenges. Whether she’s hiking through the dense tropical forests of Colombia in search of rare plant species, noting her findings in the laboratory, or blocking a header on the soccer field, she employs the same diligence and problem-solving tactics to ensure the best possible result.
As a grad student at NYBG, Virnig’s work focuses on the neotropical blueberries that so often cause a stir in our Haupt Conservatory. The exotic shapes and colors of the Conservatory’s collection are only a small sample of their incredible diversity in South America, where the wealth of species goes well beyond the common blueberries, cranberries, and huckleberries that we associate with this plant tribe in the U.S. Zoning in on the historic and cultural uses of these plants, as well as the antioxidants and other health benefits provided by them, Virnig has found herself drawn to the town of El Queremal in Colombia, where an eponymous flower has captured imaginations for centuries.
Microscopic green alga Spirogyra, with its spirally arranged chloroplasts. Photograph from the Delwiche lab.
Plants produce 98 percent of atmospheric oxygen through photosynthesis. Everything we eat comes directly or indirectly from plants. One quarter of prescription drugs come directly from plants or are plant derivatives. Fossilized plants provide energy in the form of fossil fuels such as oil and coal.
Given the importance of plants in every aspect of our lives, humans study plants to understand processes that are critical to our own survival and to the health of the planet. Beyond their obvious importance, plants have played key roles in a broad range of biological discoveries that have helped us understand some of the most fascinating mysteries of life.
One of the most important research facilities at The New York Botanical Garden is the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, but unless you’re a plant scientist or seriously interested in botany, chances are you’re unfamiliar with what a herbarium is and why it’s crucial to the task of understanding and conserving Earth’s plant life.
Simply put, a herbarium is a library of plants—7.3 million preserved plant specimens, in the case of the Steere Herbarium. That makes it the largest herbarium in the Western Hemisphere and one of the four largest in the world.
But what can researchers learn from all those specimens? How do they use the knowledge stored there? How was the Steere Herbarium founded, and does it contain just the things that average people think of as plants—trees, flowers and shrubs? What about seaweed, moss, lichens and mushrooms?
