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Plant Research and Conservation at The New York Botanical Garden: News and Media

Herbarium 2020 – FGVC7: Identify plant species from herbarium specimens

In recent years, Fine-Grained Visual Recognition Competitions (FGVCs) have spurred progress in the development of image classification models focused on detection of fine-grained visual details in both natural and man-made objects. This year, Google and The New York Botanical Garden have expanded their partnership for the Herbarium 2020 challenge.

In the Herbarium 2020 challenge, researchers are invited to tackle the problem of identifying species of land plants. This challenge is distinguished in that the included images depict dried specimens preserved on herbarium sheets, exclusively. Herbarium sheets are essential to plant science, as they not only preserve the key details of the plants for identification and DNA analysis, but also provide a rare perspective into plant ecology in a historical context. As the world’s second largest herbarium, NYBG’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium contributed a dataset of over 1 M specimens representing over 32,000 species for this year’s challenge.

Details on Kaggle

Details on Github

NY Times: She Wanted to Revive a Park, but First She Had to Take on the Rats

Aleya Lehmann grew tired of watching Verdi Square decay over 16 years—the park was so bad that it became known as Vermin Square or Rat Park. So, Ms. Lehmann gathered a small group of like-minded volunteers to beautify the small slice of the Upper West Side for themselves.

Daniel Atha, a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden who lives near the park, joined the group after meeting them at a volunteer drive. He convinced Ms. Lehmann that instead of boxwoods, she and her fellow volunteers should plant native species, which would attract pollinators, insects, and create a waypoint for animals, and humans, between Central Park and Riverside Park. “This is a community garden, with the parks department, but instead of vegetables, we’re planting for the birds and the butterflies,” Mr. Atha said while working in the garden last fall.

One person’s vision, inspired volunteers, expert advice, a successful rat abatement program, and Verdi Square is Rat Park no longer!

NY Times Article

National Parks Magazine: A Liking for Lichens

Every summer for a decade, Erin Tripp and NYBG Lichenologist James Lendemer visit Great Smoky Mountains to look for lichens, organisms that Tripp describes as fungi and algae sandwiches.

When they started their project, researchers had estimated that the 463 species that were documented in Great Smoky Mountains National Park represented at least 90% of the total number of lichen species in the park. After walking at least 2,000 miles and devoting personal funds and countless hours to the effort, they have identified a total of 920 lichen species — a record for a national park — including eight that occur nowhere else in the world and one that had been presumed to be extinct. In addition to doubling the number of species known for the park, Tripp and Lendemer described more than 35 species that were new to science.

National Parks Article

Foodie Pharmacology: Jamaican Roots

The Caribbean is home to an amazing assortment of botanicals from merging cultures. In Jamaica, wild plants are used to make special fermented “root tonics” not only as an enjoyable beverage, but also to boost health. Some of these are even attributed with aphrodisiac properties for men and women.

In this podcast episode, host Cassandra Quave speaks with Dr. Ina Vandebroek—ethnobotanist and expert in wild Caribbean plants used as food and medicine. They discuss root tonics and other local delights like “bissy” and “cerassee,” which also play an important role in food and medicine in Jamaica.

Foodie Pharmacology Podcast

Science Advances: Global and future distribution of rarity across land plants

An international team of researchers, including an NYBG scientist, has concluded that more than a third of all plant species are exceptionally rare, making them highly vulnerable to extinction from such threats as habitat destruction and climate change.

In a study published by the online research journal Science Advances, scientists analyzed the largest compilation of global plant observation data ever assembled to determine how many of the roughly 435,000 total plant species should be considered very rare. They found that 36.5 percent, or more than 158,000 species, fall into that category.

SCIENCE TALK BLOG POST

SCIENCE ADVANCES ARTICLE

One Thousand Plant Genomes: Understanding One Billion Years of Evolution

Did you ever wonder how a pumpkin is related to a pine tree? Our scientists are using new scientific tools to build the tree of life by comparing the genes from over 1000 species of plants. Take a dive into the origins of Earth’s nearly 500,000 plant species.

SCIENCE TALK BLOG POST

NATURE MAGAZINE ARTICLE

Science Talk Blog

From the field to the lab, NYBG’s scientists aren’t just about white coats and microscopes—they’re adventurous and determined globe-trotters who live to discover, understand, and preserve Earth’s biodiversity. The Science Talk blog exposes the far-reaching work of the Garden’s botanical specialists.

VISIT SCIENCE TALK

Media Archive - 2019

Continue to the Plant Research and Conservation media archive for 2019.

Media Archive - 2018

Continue to the Plant Research and Conservation media archive for 2018.

Media Archive - 2017

Continue to the Plant Research and Conservation media archive for 2017.