Publications & Documents

North American forests and forest management institutions are experiencing a wide range of significant ecological disturbances and socioeconomic changes, which point to the need for enhanced resilience. A critical capacity for resilience in institutions is strategic foresight. This article reports on a project of the North American Forest Commission to use Futures Research to enhance the resilience of forest management institutions in North America.

The purpose of a fundraising communications toolkit for board members is to provide them with the “tools” that they need to effectively raise funds for your organization. As board members are often in a face-to-face situation where they are speaking with potential donors on behalf of the organization, this recommended toolkit focuses on providing key information about the organization to board members, often in a script format or a concise document with easily-digestible bullet points.

These documents help address the following questions/topics to help those gardens in need of developing best practices for working with and recruiting your board:

• How to navigate board members that have numerous professional and personal affiliations. 
• Strong policies and practices related to reporting and addressing harassment.
• What goes into a board manual?
• Where is race on your board's recruitment agenda?
• Ways to improve board recruitment 

Studies in plant phenology have provided some of the best evidence for large-scale responses to recent climate change. Over the last decade, more than thirty studies have used herbarium specimens to analyze changes in flowering phenology over time, although studies from tropical environments are thus far generally lacking. In this review, we summarize the approaches and applications used to date.

Drought‐tolerant plants are increasingly recognized as a resource to mitigate the consequences
of climate change. Succulent plants use stored water to sustain metabolism
during regular droughts; succulence is a highly successful adaptation that has
evolved in thousands of species throughout the plant kingdom. Desert (xeromorphic)
succulent species are a potentially relevant resource to manage environments and
energy supply in the hottest and driest places. However, many species are threatened

Herbarium specimens are increasingly recognized as an important resource for conservation

Plants are essential resources for the earth and human survival. Many plant species are threatened by human disturbance and are now in danger of extinction. The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) seeks to halt the continuing loss of plant diversity and species across the globe. China endorsed the GSPC in 2002, and launched a national plant conservation strategy related to the GSPC in 2008. This paper assesses the progress of GSPC implementation in China.

A major challenge in articulating human dimensions of climate change lies in translating global climate forecasts into impact assessments that are intuitive to the public. Climateanalog mapping involves matching the expected future climate at a location (e.g., a person’s city of residence) with current climate of another, potentially familiar, location - thereby providing a more relatable, place-based assessment of climate change.

In any major emergency, you will be working with local emergency responders to save and secure
your institution. If you have a good relationship with your local emergency responders and know
how their systems and practices work, you can help them keep your staff and collections safe.

Major international herbaria, natural history museums and universities have recently begun to digitise their collections to facilitate studies and improve access to collections. In Japan, more than 10 million herbarium specimens are housed in various universities/museums; however, only 1% of these have been digitised. In this paper, we describe a new method for imaging herbarium specimens that is applicable to local/small herbaria.