The Arboretum in the Harvard Gazette
Museum exhibition designer Danielle Hanrahan always loved art and nature. A late-in-life career move to the Harvard Herbaria allowed her a chance to explore the latter. more »
A freshman seminar helps students to understand Darwin by reading his works and re-creating 10 experiments — including one showing that the wiggly creatures just don’t hear. more »
Visiting Professor Pamela Diggle took listeners into the botanical roots of Thanksgiving dinner, illustrating how nature’s everyday trials forced plants to come up with unusual — and delicious — ways to survive. more »
Mobile Initiatives at the Arboretum
The Arnold Arboretum is actively developing mobile applications to facilitate use and expand access to the living plant collections. In order to improve access to the collections for the public and scientists alike, the Arboretum's information technology staff are developing strategies to share our data through easy-to-use technologies. This week, the Arboretum marks an important milestone in this effort with the release of test versions for two software applications for mobile devices. more »
2012 Research Awards Announced
The Arnold Arboretum is pleased to announce that it has granted several research awards to support studies that utilize the institution’s collections of living plants, herbarium specimens, and extensive library and archival resources. more »
Arboretum and Boston Teachers Union School partner for science education
Growing out of a longstanding commitment to sharing knowledge about the natural world, the Arnold Arboretum’s educational programming for children began in the 1980s with the introduction of field study opportunities in the historical landscape. While this programming continues to thrive today, the Arboretum’s Boston Teachers Union School collaboration is designed to provide science instruction as an integral part of student learning throughout the school year. more »
Arboretum’s Weld Hill Research Building Awarded Prestigious LEED® Green Building Certification
The Arnold Arboretum is pleased to announce that the Weld Hill Research Building has been awarded LEED® Gold in assessments established by the U.S. Green Building Council and verified by the Green Building Certification Institute. more »
Arboretum Heralds Release of New USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map
This week, the US Department of Agriculture unveiled its new Plant Hardiness Zone Map (PHZM), a development that has been long anticipated by gardeners and researchers. Like its earlier incarnations, the new PHZM provides guidelines to predict a region’s average annual minimum temperature, a vital statistic in determining whether or not a plant may survive the winter in a particular area. more »
Warm weather encourages winter annuals
Changes in weather can favor species with the capacity and flexibility to respond to opportunities presented by our changing climate. The unusually warm weather we’ve experienced in southern New England this fall and winter encourages the growth of a group of weedy herbs known as winter annuals. more »
Online map application unlocks Arboretum collections
The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University is pleased to announce the release of Collection Researcher version 1.0, an innovative web application that provides unique access to the Arboretum’s living plant collections through its geographic information system (GIS). Available on the Arboretum website, Collection Researcher integrates a searchable inventory of the Arboretum’s nearly 15,000 documented trees, shrubs, and vines with high-definition, digital maps of its 265-acre landscape. The application represents an enormous step forward in providing visiting researchers, the general public, and Arboretum staff with practical tools to explore the collections. more »
On October 28-29, the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University was buzzing with twenty two college educators learning and discussing ways to teach genomics in the classroom. The two day iPlant Collaborative faculty workshop was taught by Jason Williams from the DNA Learning Center of Cold Spring Harbor Labs. more »
Emergent Forest of New England
Though the transformation of farm fields into forests is a New England conservation victory, senior research scientist Peter Del Tredici said that turning back the environmental clock and “restoring” pre-colonial woodlands is an impossible goal. more »
A breakthrough study of international significance has categorically debunked the widely held belief that today’s cycads existed during dinosaur times. The leader of the study, Dr. Nathalie Nagalingum, said that a combination of fossil study and DNA sequencing has revealed that contemporary species are entirely different from those growing in the Jurassic period which began 200 million years ago. more »