Missouri Botanical Garden researchers used DNA testing to rediscover Dracaena umbraculifera, which was thought to be extinct. The methods and results were published in Oryx. The authors include Garden researchers in both St. Louis and Madagascar. 

Missouri Botanical Garden researcher Dr. Carmen Ulloa is the lead author of “An Integrated Assessment of Vascular Plant Species of the Americas,” published in Science. Ulloa along with 23 co-authors compiled a comprehensive, searchable checklist of 124,993 species, 6,227 genera and 355 families of vascular plants of the Americas. This represents one third of all known vascular plants worldwide.

Scientists from the Missouri Botanical Garden, Kansas State University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale completed a study on the effects of climate change on one of the Midwest’s most dominant and economically important grassland plants. The results have been published by the peer-reviewed journal Global Change Biology.

The Missouri Botanical Garden recently announced the promotions of Andrew Wyatt to Senior Vice President Horticulture & Living Collections and Vickie Campbell to Senior Director, Operations. 

With help from a Garden researcher, Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) officially established Lomami National Park, the first national park since 1970 and only the eighth in the country.  

Missouri Botanical Garden researcher Dr. Peter Jørgensen is among the authors of “The discovery of the Amazonian tree flora with an updated checklist of all known tree taxa,” published July 13 in Scientific Reports. The new study compiles a checklist of 11,676 known Amazonian tree species using records from a number of institutions collected between 1707 and 2015 including the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Scientists at the Missouri Botanical Garden discovered more than 180 new species of plants in 2015, a number which will likely represent approximately 10 percent of all new species discovered in the world last year. More than 60 Garden researchers were credited as authors of new species descriptions. 

In June, the Missouri Botanical Garden and its partner organizations released two crowdsourcing games in an effort to improve access to books and journals in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).  One of those games, Smorball, was recently named Best Learning Game at the Boston Festival of Indie Games. The award recognizes games that promote civic engagement and have an impact on culture at large.

The Missouri Botanical Garden and its partner organizations released two crowdsourcing games today in an effort to improve access to books and journals in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The games were created as part of “Purposeful Gaming and BHL” an Institute of Library Services (IMLS) grant-funded project established in 2013 at the Garden with partners from Harvard University, Cornell University and The New York Botanical Garden.

The Missouri Botanical Garden has reached a major milestone in its Art of Life project – over 1 million biodiversity images have been uploaded to Flickr from the books and journals of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). In 2012, the Garden received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Art of Life project whose goal is to increase access to the natural history illustrations found within the BHL.