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Brooklyn Botanic Garden 2003 Annual Report
Science
Throughout the year, New York Metropolitan Flora researchers worked on the multidecade survey of the region's plant life. Having completed research on woody plants, they continued conducting extensive fieldwork on wetland and aquatic plants. In 2003, the NYMF database increased to 258,520 records, up 16,200 from 2002, and the bibliography grew to 12,825 entries, an increase of 430.
The Horticultural Taxonomy Program continued its work on identifying and verifying plants in BBG's living collections and met its goal of making the plant records database available to professionals and the public via the Garden's web site. By logging on to www.bbg.org, scientists and plant enthusiasts are now able to determine which species are growing in the Garden, and where. At the end of the year, the database included 14,387 live accessions, an increase of 862 from 2002.
A total of 2,801 dried specimens were accessioned by the Herbarium. The database of the Herbarium's type collection, which includes the important specimens used to name and describe species, was made available online—increasing the scientific community's access to these significant collections. BBG's Index Seminum, or list of available seeds, was distributed to 200 gardens around the world. Seed from some 120 different species were collected on the grounds, and 564 packets of seed were sent to 91 institutions around the world.
In 2003, BBG scientists contributed extensively to describing, mapping, and understanding the relationships among the world's plants. The Garden signed a contract with Timber Press for the publication of a book entitled Begonias: Their Cultivation, Natural History, and Identification. The text, being written by Dr. Mark Tebbitt, is due to be published in fall 2005. After making the first New Jersey collection of Lechea tenuifolia, Dr. Kerry Barringer submitted a manuscript on this rare species, a tiny herb of dry habitats with fruit about the size of a pinhead, to the Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society. He also located new stands of a rare plant in New York, Aristolochia serpentaria, a small herb whose interesting flowers are often buried in leaf litter, and has begun to document the spread of Arthraxon hispidus, a potentially invasive plant, in New Jersey. Dr. Steven Clemants, BBG's Vice President of Science, Library, and Publications, carried on with his research of the goosefoot family (Chenopodiaceae) and the amaranth family (Amaranthaceae). His work will culminate in the first complete, worldwide list of the genera and species in these families. Dr. Jinshang Ma continued his research on two important trees, the dawn redwood (Metasequoia) and the cork tree (Phellodendron). His paper on Metasequoia was published in the journal Taxon. Dr. Gerry Moore, in collaboration with colleagues from Argentina and North Carolina's Duke University, described a new species of Rhynchospora from southern Brazil. The species may be extinct; it is known only from two herbarium collections from the 1950s.