You are here

Featured Resource

Climate change and wildfires: lessons from Australia’s Blue Mountains

Periodic fires are a normal part of the lifecycle of many ecosystems, but climate change is creating mega-fires that instead of supporting biodiversity threaten to destroy it. In the aftermath of the worst fire season in Australia’s recorded history,...

Resource
1/13/21
Awareness, Support, and Perceived Impact of the Connecticut Pesticide Ban

Concern over the use of pesticides in public areas, such as schools, daycare centers, and parks, has prompted some state and local governments to severely restrict or ban pesticides in these locations. Connecticut currently has bans for daycare centers...

Resource
1/22/20
Botanic Gardens Conservation International: Botanic gardens and their contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals

We need a major paradigm shift in the way we build and operate our gardens and live our lives. Being less bad, which is what most sustainability programs seek to achieve, is not going to help us solve major human and environmental challenges such as...

Resource
1/8/20
Crop Science Special Issue: Connecting Agriculture, Public Gardens and Science

North America’s agricultural and natural landscapes are vital to feeding humanity—they are home to many populations of important food plants and their wild relatives. Climate change is projected to significantly impact the agricultural sector and any...

Resource
11/25/19
Strategic science planning for responsible stewardship and plant protection at the U.S. Department of Agriculture

Agriculture is comprised of managed ecosystems, which can include forests, rangelands
and crops; these managed ecosystems are vital resources, providing a host
of economic and societal benefits. However, these systems face a multitude of...

Resource
11/15/19
Campus-Based Ecotourism: A Case Study on the Power of Local Ecotourism

Academic campuses across the Great Plains can serve as landscapes for teaching and learning about native flora of cultural importance with regard to food, medicine, and lifeways. Campus visitors (tourists) and local community members could benefit from...

Resource
10/30/19
Can plants help us avoid seeding a human‐made climate catastrophe?

Drastic phase down of our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from burning fossil fuels
within decades will likely be insufficient to avoid seeding catastrophic human‐caused
climate change. We have to also start removing CO2 from the...

Resource
9/27/19
An Update of the Literature Supporting the Well-Being Benefits of Plants: Part 2 Physiological Health Benefits

This paper focused on providing evidence from the literature regarding the physiological health benefits associated with plants, thereby influencing the physiological, psychological, and cognitive well-being constructs affecting quality of life. These...

Resource
8/20/19
A Road Map for Conservation, Use, and Public Engagement around North America’s Crop Wild Relatives and Wild Utilized Plants

Crop wild relatives—the plant species closely related to agricultural crops—are valuable
genetic resources used by plant breeders to increase pest and disease resistance, stress
tolerance, nutritional profile, and other traits critical to...

Resource
8/20/19
Outreach Tools to Speak Out for Plants and Science

Contact your elected representatives and let them know how you feel about plants, our web of life, and the ecosystem services we all depend upon:

  • Ask them to cosponsor H.R. 1572 The Botanical Sciences and Native Plant Materials Research,
  • ...
Resource
5/13/19
Indigenous knowledge networks in the face of global change

Indigenous communities rely extensively on plants for food, shelter, and medicine. It is still unknown, however, to what degree their survival is jeopardized by the loss of either plant species or
knowledge about their services. To fill this gap...

Resource
5/7/19
Training in Plant Genetic Resources Management: A Way Forward

The USDA-ARS National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS) is a coordinated network of 19 genebank locations throughout the United States that perform research to acquire, maintain,
regenerate, document, distribute, characterize, and evaluate plant...

Resource
3/26/19
A Nonprofit Perspective on Business–Nonprofit Partnerships: Extending the Symbiotic Sustainability Model

Using the symbiotic sustainability model as a framework, this research investigates how many and with which businesses top nonprofit organizations report partnerships. We examined the websites of the 122 largest, most recognizable U.S. nonprofits....

Resource
1/30/19
The role of botanic gardens in the twenty-first century

Sarada Krishnan (Denver Botanic Gardens) and Ari Novy (the United States Botanic Garden) recently teamed up to write and publish an article on "The role of botanic gardens in the twenty-first century", providing a contemporary roadmap and guidance for...

Resource
4/3/17