Members of the MSNH met on a late morning at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx to be greeted by Laura Briscoe, the Assistant Director for the Cryptogamic Herbarium. Laura gave us some historic background on the founding of this world-class institituion, challenging the well-known story of unusual egality shared between both co-founders, Elizabeth and Nathaniel Britton.
Thus equipped, we proceeded into the herbarium, one of the largest in the world. First, we were able to observe a room where busy volunteers help digitize their collection, making it accessible to anyone who has access to the internet. After taking an elevator, we proceeded in the first of many rooms, which house the collection of the herbarium: movable cabinets, full of pressed, dried plants, glued on sheets of paper, with a wealth of information added to it, like collection date and place. Such information allows researchers to not only reconstruct long-gone environments (we must do something!), but also provides genetic samples to test for relatedness and reconstruct phylogenetic trees.
Laura generously placed some of the highlights of the collection on tables, and what wonders we could see: specimens collected by Charles Darwin, adorable moss-booklets, mesmerizing seaweed collections, amidst slime molds, and first appearances of the deadly American chestnut fungus, which killed most of these magnificent trees throughout the East Coast. Other, plants brought over by slaves were documented, providing insights how such collections could also serve our understanding outside of biology.
We want to thank Laura for a truly wonderful day and appreciate her generosity to spend Sunday afternoon with us.
To view more photos from this event, please visit our gallery. Photo credit for this event goes to Daniel Kukla Elise Morton.
Laura Briscoe is the Assistant Director of the Herbarium, overseeing the Cryptogamic Collections at the New York Botanical Garden. She received her B.A. in Human Ecology at the College of Bar Harbour in Maine, with a focus on botany and museum studies, and her M.S. on liverwort taxonomy, morphology and evolution at Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanical Garden. She also worked as a Curatorial Assistant at the Field Museum in Chicago for a decade. For her research, Laura has traveled to Chile and Fiji. At NYBG she manages close to two million collections of algae, bryophytes, lichens and fungi and is currently overseeing the digitization of lichens and bryophytes outside of North America.