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Brooklyn Botanic Garden 2005 Annual Report
Conservation
Brooklyn Botanic Garden continues its deep commitment to conservation at the local, regional, and global levels, particularly by building strong networks for plant conservation. Over the past year, BBG has played a major role in developing and sustaining Botanic Gardens Conservation International, the Invasive Plant Council of New York, and Nature Network, a collaboration of 40 institutions in the New York metropolitan area.
BBG hosts the U.S. office of Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI). By bringing together the world's botanic gardens, BGCI seeks to create a broad community that works in partnership to achieve conservation and education goals—in particular, to raise awareness of the importance of plant conservation among the 200 million people who visit botanic gardens every year.
Over the past 12 months, BGCI has become reinvigorated with new staff and a broader vision. In 2004 and 2005, the organization held a series of regional workshops to promote the International Agenda for Botanic Gardens in Conservation. These workshops were held at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center (Austin, Texas), Missouri Botanical Garden (St. Louis), and Santa Barbara [California] Botanic Garden. For the past 18 months, BGCI and BBG staff have worked on a North American Botanical Garden Strategy for Plant Conservation, together with the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta (AABGA), the Canadian Botanical Conservation Network, the Center for Plant Conservation, and the Association of Mexican Botanical Gardens.
Brooklyn Botanic Garden has long been recognized for its leadership role on the issue of invasive plants. More than ten years ago, BBG published a pioneering handbook on invasive plants in the garden. It is estimated by researchers at Cornell University that invasive species of plants and animals cost the United States more than $120 billion annually to contain and eradicate—attempts to control the Asian longhorned beetle in New York City and Long Island alone cost $13 million to $40 million annually. Dr. Steven Clemants, BBG's vice president of Science, Library, and Publications, has been particularly active in fighting the invasive-species battle. He is currently vice-chair of the Invasive Plant Council of New York State (IPC), a nonprofit group working to create the tools to manage invasive plants. In 2003, partly through the work of the Invasive Plant Council, the state created a New York Invasive Species Task Force, which is studying the problem and will report to the governor and legislature in November 2005. Dr. Clemants is the IPC representative to this task force, and he and BBG hosted a meeting of the group in January 2005.
At the local level, BBG has spent the past five years in ongoing discussions about forming an alliance of environmental and nature groups dedicated to nurturing a healthy environment in the New York City region. The group, Nature Network, was formally created in April 2005, and it now has more than 40 members. Dr. Clemants was elected president of the alliance. In May, Nature Network sponsored a two-day conference on the state of the environment in the New York metropolitan area, which drew more than 200 attendees.
The Center for Urban Restoration Ecology (CURE), a joint venture between BBG and Rutgers University, has worked with architectural partners on the design of several parks. In January 2004, CURE and Sasaki Associates were awarded first prize in the international design competition for the Beijing Olympic Green, the primary site of the 2008 Summer Games. CURE is also working with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates on the new Brooklyn Bridge Park.
BBG is also collaborating with Rutgers and the New York City Parks Department's Greenbelt Native Plant Center on an experiment to determine whether native plants that thrive in the heart of the city have evolved for urban life over the past 350 years. To determine this we will create a garden on a brownfield and grow common milkweed plants from seed taken from brownfield populations side by side with seed taken from natural habitat in the Pine Barrens, along railroad beds, and in city parks. If the plants taken from brownfields have adapted for life on brownfields, they should grow better in the brownfield garden compared with plants from the other sites; if they have not adapted for this specific habitat, they should show no difference in growth. The experiment is currently in the seed-collection, propagation, and planting phase.
The Center for Plant Conservation received a two-year grant to collect and preserve seed of endangered and threatened plants growing within national parks. BBG is collecting seed of three species growing in four parks: seabeach amaranth at Fire Island National Seashore and Gateway National Recreation Area, sensitive joint-vetch at Colonial National Historic Park, and chaffseed at Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area.
Edited by BBG'S Janet Marinelli, Plant: The Ultimate Visual Reference to Plants and Flowers of the World is a visually stunning celebration of the world's flora.
In an effort to share its expertise with the general public, BBG helped sponsor an unprecedented reference for gardeners called Plant: The Ultimate Visual Reference to Plants and Flowers of the World. Edited by Janet Marinelli, director of Publications, this visually stunning celebration of the world's flora was published in November 2004 by DK, to great acclaim around the globe. Plant features an extensive encyclopedia of 2,000 of the most spectacular and endangered plants on the planet and shows gardeners how they can play a personal and important role in helping save them. Ms. Marinelli also worked with Botanic Gardens Conservation International to launch the popular Plant for the Planet campaign, based on the book. This campaign seeks to raise awareness of everyday actions gardeners can take to help in plant conservation.
Ms. Marinelli continued to serve on the conservation committee of the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta (AABGA). She also wrote an article for the organization's magazine, Public Garden, about how public gardens and arboreta can use charismatic threatened plants to educate the public about the huge number of plant species at risk of extinction. As a member of the AABGA publications committee, she also planned a special issue of Public Garden on ex situ plant conservation.
The Garden deepened its commitment to the open-access movement, which is revolutionizing the scholarly publishing industry, by producing the second issue of Urban Habitats, its new peer-reviewed scientific e-journal on the biology of urban areas. The focus of the issue was urban wetland ecology. All papers are available at no charge online, and the journal is edited in a way that makes the information useful not only to researchers but also to government officials, landscape architects, amateur naturalists, and other interested nonscientists. The number of Web visitors to this journal, now entering its third year of publication, has tripled since its inception.
Plants & Gardens News continued its groundbreaking coverage of plant conservation and ecological gardening. Among the articles featured in the award-winning publication was a cover story on rain gardens, which are designed to mitigate the destructive effects of stormwater runoff as well as harvest rainwater to conserve freshwater supplies. Other pieces covered fragrance gardening for pollinators, the development of sterile cultivars of popular but invasive plants, and how exotic earthworms are wreaking havoc in North American forests and what vermicomposters and gardeners can do to help minimize the threat.