Stevenson Swanson is the Science Media Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.
The Cigna Foundation and the Ghetto Film School recently teamed up to host a competition among the school’s young filmmakers, who were challenged to use their video storytelling skills to highlight how some of the Foundation’s New York City-based World of Difference non-profit grant partners, including The New York Botanical Garden, are creating a positive impact on the health and well-being of local residents.
Taking second place was Bridging the Gap, by Kecia Romiel, who focused on the Botanical Garden’s innovative research led by Ina Vandebroek, Ph.D., Matthew Calbraith Perry Assistant Curator of Economic Botany and Caribbean Program Director in the Garden’s Institute of Economic Botany. Dr. Vandebroek’s project seeks to improve health care for New York’s immigrant Latino and Caribbean communities by studying the plants they use in their traditional medical practices and raising awareness of these practices among healthcare professionals.
Brian M. Boom, Ph.D., is Vice President for Conservation Strategy and Bassett Maguire Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Ina Vandebroek, Ph.D., is NYBG’s Matthew Calbraith Perry Assistant Curator of Economic Botany and Director of the Caribbean Program.
Gregory Long, NYBG’s CEO and The William C. Steere Sr. President, and Nora Monterrey, General Director of Cuba’s National Botanical Garden. The two institutions recently signed a new Memorandum of Understanding.
The New York Botanical Garden and Cuba’s National Botanical Garden (Jardín Botánico Nacional, or JBN) have a history of collaboration that spans no less than five decades on numerous specific plant research and conservation initiatives. Science Talk has chronicled some of the more recent ones here, here, and here.
Earlier this month, Nora Monterrey, JBN’s General Director, and Alejandro Palmarola, Head of Conservation Program at JBN, visited NYBG to launch an exciting new era for collaboration between our two institutions. The discussions about this renewed commitment for collaboration began in Havana in July 2015, when one of us (Brian) went to Cuba to meet Nora as the new General Director of JBN and to discuss how our institutions could best join forces on cutting-edge science or conservation projects.
However, in a visionary move, Nora Monterrey proposed to take our collaboration to the next level. Instead of a specific agreement for a specific collaborative project, she envisioned establishing a wide-reaching umbrella agreement, spanning multiple years. This approach, which is laid out in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), will promote all sorts of collaborative initiatives between our institutions–not only science and conservation but also other programmatic areas such as education, horticulture, and exhibitions, as well as support areas, such as marketing, outreach, and sustainable tourism.
Esther Jackson is the Public Services Librarian at NYBG’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library, where she manages Reference and Circulation services and oversees the Plant Information Office. She spends much of her time assisting researchers, providing instruction related to library resources, and collaborating with NYBG staff on various projects related to Garden initiatives and events.
Thomas Walter and His Plants: The Life and Work of a Pioneer American Botanist, a new book from The New York Botanical Garden Press, documents how Walter named, for the first time, many native plants in North America in his Flora Caroliniana, published in 1788. Part history, but mostly scientific, Thomas Walter and His Plants will be of interest to botanists, bibliophiles, and history-of-science enthusiasts.
Flora Carolinianawas the first flora written in America that used Carl Linnaeus’ classification system and binomial nomenclature. In terms of modern taxonomy, this is a very big deal. The way that plants are still named today has its basis in Linnaeus works, specifically his Species Plantarum, published in 1753. After this publication, binomial nomenclature became the standard for naming plants. Very simply, binomial nomenclature is a system of giving plants (and other living things) a Latin name containing two parts—a genus (which is a capitalized noun) and a specific epithet (which is a lower-cased modifying adjective, often descriptive or commemorative). (Read more about taxonomic ranks, including genera and species here.)
Stevenson Swanson is the Science Media Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.
Rain forest in the Brazilian state of Acre
Representing a major advance in understanding and conserving the plant life of one of the world’s greatest biodiversity hotspots, an international team of scientists—including four researchers from The New York Botanical Garden—has created the first scientifically vetted list of known plant species in the Amazon Basin.
Based on documented plant specimens held in research collections worldwide and verified by specialists in tropical plants, the team cataloged 14,003 species of seed plants in the Amazon Basin, including 6,727 species of trees. Their research paper, which has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is available here.
Until now, the number of plant species that live in the Amazon Basin has been hotly debated, with estimates ranging from the tens to the hundreds of thousands. But those numbers have been based on ecological models or unverified species lists. This study assembles comprehensive species information based on plant specimens identified by specialists.
Stevenson Swanson is the Science Media Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.
Even in this teeming metropolis, nature is all around us. You just have to look for it. But it helps to know what you’re looking for and what you’re seeing when you’ve found it.
That’s where The New York Botanical Garden’s Urban Naturalist Program comes in.
Called “life-changing” by students who took the course this spring, the fall Urban Naturalist Program will equip you with the observation, interpretation and documentation skills necessary to become a citizen scientist and an effective environmental steward. Led by Mike Feller, our team of expert naturalists, including Ken Chaya and Nancy Slowik, will use the Botanical Garden’s grounds and select New York City parks as living labs to investigate the interrelationships between species and discover how our urban environment sustains those ecosystems.
Charles Zimmerman is the Herbarium Collections and Outreach Administrator for the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium at The New York Botanical Garden.
This chestnut specimen, collected by NYBG founder Nathaniel Britton in 1901, was part of the virtual volunteer project.
The William and Lynda Steere Herbarium is especially proud to report the successful completion of Phase I of our largest citizen-supported initiative to date, which makes much historic data for vascular plants of northeastern North America freely available online for the first time. Following the October 2016 launch of this WeDigBio worldwide citizen science event, over 190online participants contributed a total of 7,177transcriptions, providing new digital records for 300species from familiar plant families including sunflowers (Asteraceae), blueberries (Ericaceae), oaks (Fagacae) and grasses (Poaceae).
Through an ongoing partnership with Notes from Nature, virtual volunteering for Steere Herbarium projects has quickly become the most accessible platform for citizen engagement in scientific research at The New York Botanical Garden. Using any computer with access to the Internet, curious and enthusiastic volunteers can view digital images of historic preserved plant specimens in our collection. Through self-guided training (and a little practice), participants interpret and transcribe the often handwritten information on a specimen sheet about the context in which a plant was found in the wild, including the name of the scientist who collected the sample, the geographic location, and the date of collection.
An invasive species is defined as a species that is non-native to the ecosystem under consideration and causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health. Did you know that there are 146 invasive plant species that threaten the Lower Hudson Region’s ecosystems?
This season, NYBG hosted a citizen science training for the LHPRISM 2017 BlockBuster Survey that taught volunteers how to identify and monitor for 27 of the terrestrial plant species that have limited data in New York’s online mapping program called iMapInvasives and are regional candidates for eradication and containment. In one day, 22 volunteers learned how to identify each plant species, how to sample following the survey protocol, and use an app to collect the data. What makes this survey effort unique, is the extensive regional searching for presence and absence of each of the 27 terrestrial plant species. Each volunteer or team was assigned a three-mile by three-mile grid in which they have until mid September to search for the invasive species of interest.
Julia Beros has worked or interned at The New York Botanical Garden for more than two years, including at the Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory and the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden. In May, she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College.
Dr. Benjamin Torke, in a boat on the Tapajós River, studies a plant specimen.
It’s hardly a secret that the Amazon rain forest, the largest expanse of tropical rain forest on earth, houses great biodiversity and that environmental degradation from climate change and human enterprise is a massive and looming threat throughout the region. The most critically threatened areas also happen to be the least studied and inventoried, but they are estimated to have the highest biodiversity within the Amazon rain forest. NYBG scientist Benjamin Torke, Ph.D., is working to fill in the gaps in our understanding of the rich plant life in one such area in the state of Pará in the southeastern part of the Brazilian Amazon.
Recently, environmental degradation has threatened the potential for capturing and sharing this knowledge. In the southeastern regions of the Amazon, many of the detrimental effects of climate change are heightened by expanding human development. Ranching, logging, soy bean farming, mining, and settlement all contribute to the loss of natural habitat. The construction of a highway that bifurcates the forest has simultaneously created isolated regions of biodiversity and increased the rate of forest degradation. The potential loss of biodiversity is almost visible from satellite images in which beige hatched lines scratch across the dense green rain forest.
Stevenson Swanson is the Science Media Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.
When your local library doesn’t have a copy of that latest best-seller that you’ve been dying to read, it can usually request the title from another library. Something very similar happens when plant researchers are looking for preserved specimens in their field of study: they can request loans of these invaluable resources from research repositories across the globe.
NYBG’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium sends an average of 20,000 specimens out on loan every year. Even now, as millions of ultra high-resolution digital images of plant specimens are becoming readily available online in The New York Botanical Garden’s C. V. Starr Virtual Herbarium, there are still many times when nothing short of the physical specimen will do.
Stevenson Swanson is the Science Media Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.
Maureen Chilton, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, The New York Botanical Garden; and Diane Katzin, NYBG Trustee and sustainability advocate
The New York Botanical Garden’s first Before the Green is Gone: Sustainability Summit and Dinner was held at multiple sites around the Botanical Garden on Wednesday, June 14. The event was held not only to honor those who have played central roles in sustainability initiatives at the Garden and around the world but also to advance public discussion of issues at the heart of building a more sustainable world.
Three concurrent sessions on critical sustainability subjects—water, forestry, and energy—featured experts from the worlds of business, research, advocacy, and philanthropy. Held at active conservation sites around the Garden, the information-packed sessions offered speakers the opportunity to share challenges and discuss practical solutions to these important issues.
The Cigna Foundation and the Ghetto Film School recently teamed up to host a competition among the school’s young filmmakers, who were challenged to use their video storytelling skills to highlight how some of the Foundation’s New York City-based World of Difference non-profit grant partners, including The New York Botanical Garden, are creating a positive impact on the health and well-being of local residents.
