Home » More About BBG » Annual Report » 2007
Engaging in research in plant sciences to expand human knowledge of plants, and disseminating the results to plant science professionals and the general public…
Brooklyn Botanic Garden has a long and distinguished history of accomplishment in the plant sciences, including work in plant systematics, breeding, and pathology. The Garden's current research focuses on the urban environment, global climate change, and cultivated plants, with a goal of making research findings relevant to the general public as well as to the scientific community.
Over 2,000 native plants find a home in the metropolitan New York area, yet 450 of these species are considered rare, threatened, or endangered regionally. With continued development, global climate change, and the rapid increase and spread of invasive plants, local ecosystems are being altered and weakened. By the beginning of the next century, nearly two thirds of the world's plant species could be lost forever. As a leading institution of botanic research, BBG continues to disseminate important scientific knowledge and to increase public awareness of the importance of studying, protecting, and preserving plant life.
Science
Over the past year, the Garden's Herbarium staff completed its database project "AILANTHUS Grows in Brooklyn," which began in 2004. AILANTHUS (which stands for All-Integrated LiterAture, NomenclaTure, and HerbariUm System) is the Science Department's primary database. For the project, Herbarium staff curated the Garden's herbarium specimens collected from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut and created a web-searchable database (bbg.org/sci/herbarium) of the label information from these specimens. Data from 50,000 specimens were entered, data from 5,000 previously entered specimens were corrected, and more than 3,000 duplicates of historical collections were distributed to other herbaria. By the end of the project, data from 75,000 specimens had been made available on the Internet.
The project, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, was part of a long-term effort by Brooklyn Botanic Garden to curate and catalog the specimens in the Garden's herbarium. The Garden's goal is for more people to be aware of the specimens in its herbarium collection and to make the specimens and their data readily available for research. The searchable database was immediately popular and is being regularly used by government agencies, conservation organizations, and researchers. In May, BBG scientists attended the annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections and presented a poster on AILANTHUS.
Scientists at BBG perform fieldwork throughout the New York metropolitan region. Dr. Gerry Moore is seen here collecting plants at Sandy Hook, New Jersey.
Researchers with the New York Metropolitan Flora (NYMF) project, BBG's multi-decade effort to inventory the present and historic distribution of plant species in all counties within a 50-mile radius of Manhattan, carried on their studies of the local flora. Fieldwork continued throughout the area, including a collecting trip with New York City Department of Parks and Recreation staff to the city's historic High Line rail structure. A significant achievement was expanding the NYMF webpages, which now provide detailed distibution maps for over 1,500 species for the area. These distribution maps provide excellent information on how the flora is changing, for example through the introduction and spread of nonnative species and the decline of native species.
The database developed by NYMF is also playing a major part in several collaborations. Dr. Gerry Moore, in collaboration with researchers at Rutgers University's Grant F. Walton Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis, is conducting regional and scale modeling of the distribution of invasive plant species. A grant proposal was submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency to support this proposed collaborative effort. Dr. Steven Clemants was invited to participate in a working group on Functional Traits of Urban Plants held in February 2007 at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Melbourne, Australia. The data developed by NYMF will be fundamental to any outcomes of this and future meetings of the working group.
In August, Garden scientists collected air samples around the blooming titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum). These samples are being used in a collaboration with scientists from Takasago International Corporation in Rockleigh, New Jersey, to analyze the scent compounds from the titan arum.
The Garden's Horticultural Taxonomy program conducts research on the classification of cultivated plants and oversees the records of BBG's plant collections, including over 32,000 plant accessions and over 21,000 name records. Staff have now mapped over 1,800 plants on the Garden's grounds. The information is used to update the public labels in the Garden and the descriptions in BBG's illustrated, searchable database of living plants, which now includes nearly 900 photographs.
BBG's six Ph.D.-holding scientists carried on systematic research in many areas. Dr. Jinshuang Ma continued his research on the flora of China, especially the dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), and he helped coordinate a conference on this species at Yale University in August. Dr. Ma, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Michigan and the Smithsonian Institution and with funding from the National Science Foundation, is researching the taxonomy of the large and complex spurge genus, Euphorbia. This has required Dr. Ma to make many trips to other herbaria, including a trip in May to Paris to the Laboratoire de Phanérogamie at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle.
BBG's Molecular Research Laboratory enables the Science staff to study the evolution and genetics of a wide variety of plants.
Current research in the Garden's Molecular Research Laboratory includes investigation into the cashew family (Anacardiaceae), a research specialty of plant molecular systematist Dr. Susan Pell, and the goosefoot family (Chenopodiaceae), a specialty of Dr. Clemants. The lab is also used extensively by the Garden's environmental education and internship programs for high school students.
In the research journal Systematic Botany, Dr. Pell described a new genus, Poupartiopsis, belonging to the cashew family. She also finished a treatment of the family which will appear in K. Kubitski's forthcoming book, The Familes and Genera of Vascular Plants. In July, Dr. Pell presented the results of her research at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America and the American Society of Plant Taxonomists in Chico, California. Dr. Mark Tebbitt continued final editing for his upcoming book Corydalis and Bleeding Hearts, to be published by Timber Press and BBG. Dr. Kerry Barringer continued his research on local flora, including preparing a flora for the Franklin Parker Preserve in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. In March, Dr. Moore traveled to Playa Grande, Costa Rica, as part of a team of researchers from Drexel University and the Philadelphia Botanical Club, to conduct floristic surveys of Parque Nacional Marino las Baulas along with scientists from the park. This park supports the last major nesting area for the critically imperiled leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea). The research team plans to write a flora for the park later this year. This travel was supported by the Leatherback Trust and Drexel University.