Dr. Peter Fritsch, BRIT’s VP of Research and Director of the Herbarium, is on a visiting scholarship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, based at the Kunming Institute of Botany in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. Peter went on a brief (8-day) field trip in late October-early November to far northeastern Yunnan Province and the bordering area of Guizhou Province.

Just imagine trying to keep up with 25 energetic, enthusiastic, inquisitive high school students for a week in the middle of a hot, dry summer in the semi-arid country around Junction, Texas. Well, I accepted that challenge even though it had been 35 years since the last time I did it!

We met at the office at 6:30 am and proceeded to spend about two hours packing the truck with food. 40 mouths are many to feed, and after hundreds of pounds of coolers, boxes, bags of rice, and beans, stuffed in between with fresh fruit, we load up and hit the road...

In April 2016, a world record myxomycete was discovered on the BRIT campus. We're here to answer your questions: What is a myxomycete? Why does this matter? Should we be scared of it?

High school students from Trinity Valley School spent their summer break utilizing their computer science skills to create a quick and easy way to determine the fullness of our herbarium cabinets.

Must we say more than is in the title? Haley Rylander looks back on her varied experiences during her BRIT internship.

We love playing a part in saving rare plants. But BRIT has a unique role in the process: documentation of rare species. If you don’t know it’s there, you can’t conserve it!

BRIT researcher associates and colleagues work with the Maya Research Program's Blue Creek Archaeological Project to investigate the flora in far northwestern Belize. The "Grey Fox" site is one of only four Maya plaza-pyramid centers remaining in northwestern Belize.

By Hanna Liebermann, Hendrix College biology student / BRIT intern, & Charles Gardner, bryophyte specialist / BRIT Research Associate A tiny world of wonder! (taken with an iPhone 6 through the microscope eyepiece) Bryophytes, defined by their lack of vascular tissue, are a category of smaller plants that include the mosses, liverworts, and hornworts. With the exception of the few specialists who hold these groups dear and recognize their miniature complexity, the “bryos” are generally an unsung category of botanical study. Nevertheless, they are an extremely valuable section of BRIT’s collection, representative of local and global vegetation. While the majority of BRIT’s bryophyte collection has been scanned and the packet label information entered into the Symbiota database, little had b...

I’ll admit it. I’m biased toward brevity. It’s hard to write succinctly, though. Blaise Pascal knew it (“I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter”). Shakespeare knew it, too (“Brevity is the soul of wit”). You can imagine, however, how additionally difficult it is to succinctly write for science, a field defined by its details. So when I come across science writers practicing an economy of words, I’m doubly impressed.