Ten years ago the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria embarked on an ambitious project to collect, treat and distribute storm water from the catchment within and around the botanic garden. The infrastructure of wetlands filtration, a sophisticated water ...

Intensively managed landscapes, like those found in many public gardens, attempt to mitigate the impact of significant weather events through irrigation, improving soil characteristics, and mulching. At the same time many gardens purposefully push the...

Functional traits are increasingly used to understand the ecology of plants and to predict their responses to global changes. Unfortunately, trait data are unavailable for the majority of plant species. The lack of trait data is especially prevalent...

“Which plants should I grow, and how many?” The IMLS National Leadership Project, Safeguarding our Tree Collections, seeks to answer this fundamental question. Through structured comparisons of genetic data among major groups of seed plants, management...

Botanic gardens are living museums, offering opportunities for conservation and research as well as education, experience, and enjoyment through their plant collections. A garden’s plant records system is as vital as the plants themselves, and serves...

In 2012, more than two million acres of important sage-brush habitat burned in four Western States. In the East, Hurricane Sandy caused not only widespread damage to homes and businesses, but also to native plant communities that stabilize soils and...