NYBG Hosts Free Presentation on the History of Amateur Mycology

Brian M. Boom, Ph.D., is President of the Torrey Botanical Society and Director of the Caribbean Biodiversity Program at The New York Botanical Garden.

Founded in 1867 in New York City, the Torrey Botanical Society is the oldest botanical association in the Americas. Throughout its long, distinguished history of promoting interest in botany and in disseminating information about all aspects of plants and fungi, among the most important of the Society’s activities is its lecture series. Each year, a lecture is presented in October, November, December, March, April, and May, and the schedule is posted through the Society’s Web site. The lectures are free and open to the public. Refreshments precede each lecture.

The first Torrey lecture of this season is on Tuesday, October 6, at 6:30 p.m. in the Arthur and Janet Ross Lecture Hall at The New York Botanical Garden. David W. Rose, archivist, writer, and past president of the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association, will present Great Goddess of Decay! A History of Amateur Mycology in the United States. You can read his abstract online.

In addition to hosting the lecture series, the Society publishes a scholarly journal (The Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society), organizes numerous field trips to local sites of botanical and mycological interest, and offers a series of grants and awards to support field work and seminars. I invite you to come to the October 6 lecture and to meet fellow plant and fungi enthusiasts.

Garden Scientist Studies “Culturally Keystone Species”

Brian M. Boom, Ph.D., is Director of the Caribbean Biodiversity Program at The New York Botanical Garden.

Add one more item to the long list of threats that indigenous peoples around the world have to their cultural survival: global warming.

In the past, when the climate changed, indigenous groups could usually migrate to areas where the climate was suitable for their ways of life. Now, with indigenous groups often restricted to territories that are surrounded by farms, ranches, and settlements of more populous and powerful non-indigenous peoples, there is usually no where for them to go. They must endure the climatic changes by adapting; if they cannot adapt, their cultures may become extinct.

While the general problem of climate change to indigenous groups is global, it is also occurring in the Amazon, an area I have studied. A recent New York Times article reported that a drier, hotter Amazonia due to deforestation and climate change is killing off the fauna and flora that indigenous groups of the region depend on for their survival. And I have some data that bear on elucidating the gravity of this issue.

In the 1980s, I teamed up with fellow botanist Ghillean Prance and anthropologists William Balée and Robert Carneiro on a comparative ethnobotanical project with the goal of quantifying the use of trees by four indigenous Amazonian groups. We published the results of our studies in 1987 in the journal Conservation Biology (vol. 1, no. 4) under the title “Quantitative Ethnobotany and the Case for Conservation in Amazonia.” Our main general finding was that these groups had specific cultural uses for between about 50% to more than 75% of the tree species in their territories. This result illustrates just how tightly dependent native Amazonians are on their environment for cultural survival. read more »

Brian M. Boom, Ph.D., is Special Assistant to the President and Director of the Caribbean Biodiversity Program at the Garden.

I have been around The New York Botanical Garden and involved in its scientific enterprise in one way or another for nearly three decades. Until now there has never been a publication as comprehensive as the one released last month that provides an overview of how the Botanical Garden’s scientific mission is realized. Scientific Research at The New York Botanical Garden features beautiful full-color photographs of work conducted both in the field and laboratory with informative text about current projects and facilities. It can currently be downloaded online.

Following the Preface by the Chairmen of the Garden’s Botanical Science Committee, Edward P. Bass and George M. Milne, Jr., Ph.D., and Introduction by James S. Miller, Ph.D., Dean and Vice President for Science, the book is organized as Research Facilities and Collections; Research Programs and Projects; Faculty Research Profiles; Results Shared with the World; and Training, Science Education, and Collaboration, including lists of selected research grants and faculty publications.

One of the best ways to get to the heart of the Garden’s scientific activities is to browse through the research profiles of the 32 Ph.D. faculty members who comprise the core of the Garden’s scientific staff and who are assisted in their programs and projects by postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students. The team is further enhanced by Honorary Curators and Research Fellows and hundreds of additional local, national, and international collaborators.

Readers will learn about the state-of-the-art research and collections facilities located on a 23-acre science campus within the Garden’s 250-acre landmark grounds as well as in far-flung field locations around the world. Research results, many serving to inform plant conservation and sustainable development policies, are regularly disseminated through books and journals of The New York Botanical Garden Press and increasingly via electronic catalogs and publications available from our C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium.

For those who want to discover even more, consider attending special lectures and symposia offered by the Garden, signing up for a Continuing Education class, or participating in the ecotour Ten Days in Brazil (October 10–21, 2009). Readers inspired to support the Garden’s scientific activities by volunteering and/or making a donation can learn how by clicking here.