The first expedition to the Philippines has been going splendidly, with many hundreds of collections, photographs, DNA samples, and associated field data being collected by the team. The four areas to be surveyed are Mount Marilog, Mount Limbawon, and Mount Hamiguitan, all on the island of Mindanao, and several peaks on Camiguin Island just off the north coast of Mindanao. From left to right, Gordon McPherson (Missouri Botanical Garden), Peter Fritsch (BRIT), and Victor Amoroso (Central Mindanao University) at the Mount Marilog Guest House, where we conducted the first leg of the overall expedition. The vicinity of Mount Marilog has been unexplored botanically until now, and so we are expecting a number of plant and lichen species new to science as a result of our work. Peter Fritsch in th...

As part of the BRIT LIbrary's summer internship, Annie Martin, our summer intern, is highlighting a selection of books from the Oliver G. Burk Children's Library Collection. Over the course of the summer more items will be added so please check back!

The annual Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Convention was held at the Fort Worth Convention Center at the end of March. The associated trade show was open to the public, and there were more than 200 exhibitors/vendors offering giveaways and information at various booths. Our own Dan Caudle, Resident Research Associate, worked several booths on behalf of the Youth Range Workshop , Texas Grazing Land Coalition (TXGLC) , and the Grazing Animal Nutrition (GAN) Lab at the Blackland Research and Extension Center , this last of whom (according to Dan) "test livestock fecal samples with Near Infrared Spectroscopy to determine nutritional value of the forages that have actually been consumed, digested, and passed through the animals." You know...as one does (!!!!). Though officially "retired"...

In honor of National Library Week, BRIT Library would like to highlight a recent acquisition of the BRIT Library & Archive collection. In July of 2018, BRIT Library acquired the collection of botanist Sherwin Carlquist. This acquisition includes 100,000 color field photograph slides, 5,000 microscope slides, and 15 field notebooks. Carlquist is a Guggenheim fellow and a plant anatomist based at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden Herbarium (SBBG) in California and continues to publish on his research findings to this day. Over the course of his career, the primary focus of his research has been on island biogeography and island flora. The most active years of his field research span from 1953-1989 and include regions such as Western Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Japan, Malaysia, and Africa.

In honor of International Women’s Day 2019, on March 8, 2019, BRIT Library highlighted the botanist Mary Sophie Young. As one of the earliest botanists at University of Texas, Mary Sophie Young’s extensive collecting throughout Texas greatly contributed to the flora of Texas as well as the holdings of the University of Texas herbarium. The estimated number of her collection is thought to be in the vicinity of 10,000. Young was born in Glendale, Ohio, in 1872. She earned her B.A. at Wellesley College in 1895 and her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1910. In 1912, she became the curator of the University of Texas at Austin herbarium as well as a faculty member in the botany department.

Resident Research Associate and retired USDA-NRCS rangeland specialist Dan Caudle shares his thoughts on the value of his continued involvement with the annual Texas Youth Range Workshop, the flagship educational opportunity of TSSRM (Texas Section of Society of Range Management).

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (ACMAA) sponsored Barney Lipscomb and Tiana Rehman to serve as botanical guides to West Texas for artist Mark Dion. Commissioned by the ACMAA, Mark—a contemporary artist who is part explorer, part historian, part naturalist, and part collector—is making a series of exploratory journeys through Texas that are inspired by four early naturalists/artists in Texas: Sarah Ann Lillie Hardinge (1824–1913), John James Audubon (1785–1851), Frank Law Olmsted (1822–1903), and Charles Wright (1811–1885). In 2020, the ACMAA Special Exhibition Galleries will tell the story of these early Texas Artists and natural history travelers in Texas. Map of Wright's journey through West Texas (from Flowering Plants of Trans-Pecos Texas and Adjacent Areas ) BRIT’s West Texas t...

Article written by Lani DuFresne, 2018 BRIT Herbarium and Research Intern and student at Rice University. Out of everything I’ve learned so far in my education, cursive was one of the few skills I expected I’d never use. And yet, as I spent part of my summer trying to decipher the hastily scrawled, elaborate handwritten script a botanist from the 1880’s used in his collection notes, I found myself unexpectedly grateful for it. Lani and Dr. Alejandra Vasco In all fairness, nothing else I did that summer was a task I would have expected to come across during my internship at BRIT with Dr. Alejandra Vasco , an expert on ferns. I participated in a project that aims to understand the history, distribution, diversity, and conservation challenges of native ferns in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex...

This article was written by Serina Taluja, 2018 BRIT Summer Intern and student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . Serina interned with Research Manager and Special Collections Librarian Alyssa Young working on aspects of scicomm (science communication). In April 2018, I was overjoyed to receive an email from Alyssa Young offering me the chance to come back and intern at BRIT for the second summer in a row. I spend the previous summer (2017) at BRIT, learning what an herbarium was, why it was important, and how I could contribute to it. I was excited to return to BRIT for another summer of learning! This summer definitely lived up to my expectations, and I’m now in my senior year in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Molecular and Cellular Biology program. The pre...

Education: Junior in Microbiology at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa Most Recent Project: Vanessa is currently collaborating with Dr. Harold W. Keller at BRIT on a paper about corticolous myxomycetes, a type of slime mold found on Texas American elm trees. Vanessa started this project during her 2017 summer internship and has continued the project in the year since. Favorite Memory of Summer 2017 BRIT internship: “Helping with the NLU collection acquisition in the herbarium, which led to lots of fun and laughter. The most memorable part of the whole experience for me was each intern getting a dinosaur-based nickname. Mine is Vanessasaurus Rex.” Education: Senior in Ecology at the University of Texas at Dallas Most Recent Project: Over the summer of 2018, Natch helped with BRIT summ...