Project: Aroid Flora of the Volcán Pichincha Region in Ecuador; Aroid Flora of Cordillera del Cóndor (Ecuador and Peru); Aroid florula of the Pacto-Mashpi Region (Pichincha Province) Ecuador. Tom Croat is a widely acknowledged expert on the aroid family, Araceae, a very large and diverse family in the tropics. He maintains a living aroid collection of over 10,000 plants. Dr. Croat spends much of his time in the field collecting aroids in the Andes and Amazon regions of South Ame...

Project: The genus Anthurium in northern Central America – morphology, DNA, ecology and evolution. Monica Carlsen is one of the specialists in the Araceae family at MBG. Araceae are a diverse tropical plant family with ca. 3,000 species, highly valuable as ornamental plants and flowers. Her research focuses in understanding the rapid radiation of the species-rich (ca. 900 species) Neotropical genus Anthurium (“flamingo” or “wax flower”), integrating revisi...

Project: Seed Banking Native Missouri Plants for Conservation. Seed Banks are an increasingly important component of the international efforts to preserve plant biodiversity. By storing seeds we are able to preserve a large quantity of inter- and intra-specific genetic diversity within a relatively small space, for a relatively long span of time. In the future, if species are imperiled due to habitat loss or climate change, these stored genetic resources will be available for r...