Biodiversity Collections

Scientific collections—resources from and about the natural world—are primary objects for discovering and understanding species diversity for informing efforts to conserve and manage that diversity. The Botanical Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium houses approximately 7.4 million plant and fungal specimens collected from around the world. The associated C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium provides rapid Internet access to data, images, and distribution maps for specimens in the Steere Herbarium and is an essential resource for Garden scientists, Caribbean colleagues, and the international community of scientists, students, and scholars. The Steere Herbarium and the Virtual Herbarium are in a constant state of growth and improvement through integration of new specimens, ongoing curation, and expansion of digital catalogs in the Virtual Herbarium. Some research projects emphasize the use of specimen data to address evolutionary and ecological questions.

NYBG’s Biodiversity Collections Research Projects:

American Crossroads: Digitizing the Vascular Flora of the South-Central United States
Bringing Asia to Digital Life: Mobilizing Underrepresented Asian Herbarium Collections in the US to Propel Biodiversity Discovery
Building a Global Consortium of Bryophytes and Lichens: Keystones of Cryptobiotic Communities (GLOBAL)
Digitization and Enrichment of U.S. Herbarium Data from Tropical Africa to Enable Urgent Quantitative Conservation Assessments
Index Herbariorum Upgrade: A Project to Improve Access to Information about the World’s Plant and Fungal Collections Assets
Legume Research at The New York Botanical Garden
Securing and Sharing Biocultural Diversity Collections at The New York Botanical Garden