Brian M. Boom
Curator Emeritus, Center for Biodiversity & Evolution
Ph.D., City University of New York
Specialty
Systematic botany and ethnobotany; Rubiaceae; forest inventories; conservation
Expertise
Neotropical systematic and economic botany; Rubiaceae; forest inventories; community service
Research locations
Neotropics; Northeastern United States
Research Projects
Profile
Brian Boom retired from The New York Botanical Garden as a Curator Emeritus in 2020 after a 40-year career at the institution. NYBG’s President Emeritus Gregory Long reviewed that four-decade career in a 2021 article in Botanical Review, Brian Morey Boom, Ph.D., an Appreciation.
As Curator Emeritus, he is focused principally on continuing a community science initiative he helped to establish in 2016, the New York City EcoFlora, and in completing several projects he began earlier in his career, but that got deferred due to the series of administrative positions he held at NYBG over the years. Specifically, he is now analyzing specimens and data collected from ecological forest inventories he conducted in the Cuyuni-Mazaruni region of Guyana and the Parque Nacional Cerro de la Neblina of Venezuela, as well as ethnobotanical specimens and data collected with the Chácobo people of Amazonian Bolivia and the Panare people of the Venezuelan Guayana region. Herbarium specimens he and colleagues collected in these projects, together with many other of the 11,000+ specimens he collected over his career, have many Kodachrome slides associated with them; he is working to get these slides digitized and linked to herbarium specimens in NYBG’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium and C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium, as well as many other herbaria in the United States, Europe, and in countries or territories where duplicates of his collections are deposited: Mexico, Brazil, French Guiana, Bolivia, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, Guyana, and Venezuela.
Web sites and other resources
Selected Publications
Boom, B.M. 1982. Synopsis of Isoetes in the southeastern United States. Castanea 47(1): 38-59.
Mori, S.A., B.M. Boom, A.M. De Carvalho, and T.S. Dos Santos. 1983. Southern Bahian moist forests. Botanical Review 49(2): 155-232.
Boom, B.M. 1984. A revision of Isertia (Isertieae: Rubiaceae). Brittonia 36(4): 425-454.
Boom, B.M. 1986. A forest inventory in Amazonian Bolivia. Biotropica 18: 287-294.
Boom, B.M. 1987. Ethnobotany of the Chácobo Indians, Beni, Bolivia. Advances in Economic Botany 4: 1-68.
Prance, G.T., W. Balee, B.M. Boom, and R. Carneiro. 1987. Quantitative ethnobotany and the case for conservation in Amazonia. Conservation Biology 1(4): 296-310.
Mori, S. A. and B.M. Boom. 1987. Chapter II. The forest. In: S. A. Mori and Collaborators, The Lecythidaceae of a lowland neotropical forest: La Fumée Mountain, French Guiana. Memoirs of The New York Botanical Garden 44: 9-29.
Maguire, B. and B.M. Boom. 1989. Gentianaceae, Part 3. In: B. Maguire and Collaborators, Botany of the Guayana Highland, Part XIII. Memoirs of The New York Botanical Garden 51: 2-55.
Boom, B.M. 1990. Useful plants of the Panare Indians of the Venezuelan Guayana. In: G.T. Prance and M. J. Balick (eds.), New Directions in the Study of Plants and People. Advances in Economic Botany 8: 57-76.
Boom, B.M. 1990. Flora and vegetation of the Guayana-Llanos ecotone in Estado Bolívar, Venezuela. Memoirs of The New York Botanical Garden 64: 254-278
Boom, B.M. 2012. Biodiversity without Borders: Advancing U.S.-Cuba cooperation through environmental research. Science & Diplomacy 9(3): 49-68.
Boom, B.M. 2020. Scott Alan Mori (1941-2020): An Appreciation. The Botanical Review 86(3-4): 149-179.
Documents