The video captures the activity in the Mounting Room and Digital Imaging Lab of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium as specimens are carefully glued to acid-free paper and then photographed in ultra-high resolution before they are filed in the Steere Herbarium.
There are also stunning images of rain forest and desert plants in the Botanical Garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. The variety and beauty of the plants drive home the point made by Dr. Barbara Thiers, the Garden’s Vice President for Science Administration and Director of the Herbarium.
“Plants are endlessly fascinating,” she says in the video. “We have to know what they are and how they differ from one another in order to understand what kind of measures need to be taken to protect them.”
Brian M. Boom, Ph.D., is Vice President for Conservation Strategy; Director, NYBG Press and Science Outreach; and Bassett Maguire Curator of Botany at NYBG.
As noted in my most recent post, negotiators at the Paris climate conference, known as COP21, emphasized the importance of the role of forests in addressing global warming.
The big news in the resulting accord, signed by 195 countries on December 12, appeared in Article 2 on page 21, which calls for holding the increase in the global average temperature to “well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”
Brian M. Boom, Ph.D., is Vice President for Conservation Strategy; Director, NYBG Press and Science Outreach; and Bassett Maguire Curator of Botany at NYBG.
Part of Myanmar’s Vast Forested Area
Negotiators at the Paris climate change conference (known as COP21) are in the final stretch of their effort to reach a broad accord to limit carbon emissions. Switching to alternative sources of energy that do not rely on fossil fuels, such as wind, solar, nuclear, and geothermal, is a big component of the debate, alongside controversial approaches to sequestering carbon by means of “geoengineering.”
Brian M. Boom, Ph.D., is Vice President for Conservation Strategy, Director, NYBG Press and Science Outreach, and Bassett Maguire Curator of Botany at NYBG.
Delegates at COP 21, the climate change conference in Paris, are debating the implications of global warming under various levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the years 2030, 2050, and beyond, but a subset of those delegates hailing from the South Pacific region are emphasizing that, for their nations, the future of climate change is now, as this recent New York Times story reported. Rising sea levels are threatening to engulf these low-lying islands.
Regular readers of this blog will know that The New York Botanical Garden is deeply engaged in a research and conservation project in the South Pacific, especially in Vanuatu, an island nation with a population of about 225,000 people who are spread over 65 islands and speak more than 113 indigenous languages; for a Science Talk post and short video about NYBG’s research in Vanuatu, see From the Field: A Botany Lesson in Vanuatu.
It’s a great big story, all right.
