2022 Webinar | Conserving Endangered Plants with Scientific Collections

Thank you for joining us on April 28, 2022 for the webinar: “Conserving Endangered Plants with Scientific Collections” with guest speaker Gary Krupnick, Ph.D., Head of the Plant Conservation Unit in Dept. of Botany at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Museum scientific collections are remarkable and irreplaceable sources of information about biodiversity and the history of life on Earth, yet these collections are more than a documentation of the past—they are a hope for the future. For centuries, botanists collected specimens in the field to understand plant diversity; now that many habitats are threatened, these specimens are finding a new use in conservation research.

Using botanical case studies, Dr. Krupnick talked about unconscious biases in human perception of the environment and illustrated the ways scientific collections are contributing to research in identifying and helping endangered species.

Resources and links mentioned in the presentations:

Participate in citizen science projects in DC: www.citynaturechallenge.dc.org and www.inaturalist.org/projects/pollination-dc

Plant guides to support pollinators: www.pollinator.org/gardencards

Smithsonian digital collections library: collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany