Welcome

The New England Botanical Club (NEBC), founded in 1895, is a non-profit organization that promotes the study of plants of North America, especially the flora of New England and adjacent areas. The Club publishes the journal Rhodora, holds monthly meetings during the academic year (usually at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts), maintains an herbarium of more than 253,000 sheets, has a small library, and annually grants a graduate student research award and Fernald publication award.

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Fernald Award Announced

This year's recipients of the New England Botanical Club's Merritt Lyndon Fernald Award are Bryan T. Hamlin, Walter T. Kittredge, Donald P. Lubin, and Elizabeth Barton Wright for their paper entitled "Changes in the Vascular Flora of the Middlesex Fells Reservation, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, from 1895 to 2011" published in Rhodora 114 (959): 229-308 (July 2012).
Read more...

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Graduate Student Research Awards Announced

Dennis Dietz of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Karoline Oldham of George Mason University were awarded the 2013 Graduate Student Research Awards for 2013. You can read their abstracts here.

 

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Special Achievement Award to David Boufford and Ray Angelo

On October 5th the New England Botanical Club honored David E. Boufford and Ray Angelo with a Special Achievement Award for their long-term and valuable compilation, the Atlas of the Flora of New England. Based on herbarium data and exhaustive research, the Atlas brings together current information on the county-level distribution of plant taxa growing outside of cultivation in the six New England states of the northeastern United States. Dot maps, synonymies, nativity status, and habitat information are also provided for thousands of taxa. The first installment of the Atlas was published in Rhodora in 1996, and publication continues in Phytoneuron and through continual updates online. This impressive reference work is extremely useful for botanists interested in the flora of New England and beyond.

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NEBC is part of New England Vascular Plant Thematic Collections Network

The New England Thematic Collections Network is a collaborative effort of fifteen New England herbaria to create a digitized database of all New England vascular plants, funded by the NSF. The digital database of more than 1.3 million specimens will provide an incredibly valuable resource for the study of climate change and land-use history. The NEBC is participating in the project, in partnership with Harvard. Chuck Davis is Co-PI for the project. For more information, go to http://herbarium.peabody.yale.edu/NEVP/.

Please follow these herbarium policies:

The HUH staff are getting ready to start the digitization effort, and are placing small barcode labels throughout the collections. These are slips of standard paper, 1/3 of a sheet wide. It is vital that these labels do not get shuffled around before the image capture is completed.

When working in the combined NEBC/HUH New England collections, please take special care to keep the specimens and folders in exactly the order that you found them in, and do not move or shuffle the barcode labels. Contact one of the staff if you have any questions about the collections.

Also, please note that HUH will start compactorizing the third floor of the collection starting before the New Year. This is another project also funded by NSF. Once that effort begins the third floor materials will be unavailable for six months. The very good news is that this will greatly decompress our collections in several areas, and allow for some additional growth. It will also be a much, much nicer space for visitors.