The Arboretum in the Harvard Gazette
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 »
The stunning regrowth of New England forests over the past century marks a conservation victory, but an Arnold Arboretum forest expert says there’s no turning back the clock to pre-colonial times. Today’s forests are a blend of native New England plants and invasive species, growing on a human-altered landscape. more »
Hidden Spaces is part of a series about lesser-known spaces at Harvard. The little cemetery, hidden at the far end of the 265-acre Arboretum, holds several headstones and a crypt and was once part of the Walter Street “Berrying” Ground. more »
Harvard scientists are leading an international collaboration that aims to coordinate research, data collection, scientist training, and analysis of information gleaned from two networks of forest plots, one through the Harvard-affiliated Center for Tropical Forest Science and the second created by Chinese scientists. 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 »
Ecological Studies Blossom in Bussey Brook Meadow
In the past year alone, Bussey Brook Meadow has spurred four separate studies by researchers from Tufts and Boston Universities, and has been used by students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard Medical School, and Brandeis University. more »
Arboretum announces Deland Award recipients
The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University is pleased to announce that it has awarded Deland Awards for Student Research to Juan Losada, Mariana Oliveira e Castro, and Preeti Rao. Established in 1992, the award supports research by graduate and advanced undergraduate students investigating the comparative biology of woody plants. more »