Friday, August 21, 2009

Launching of the Widely Prevalent Virus site

The Widely Prevalent Virus site is now up and running. This sites joins the Widely Prevalent Fungi site in helping better illustrate the distribution of plant pathogens in the United States. We are also working to provide images of these "Widely Prevalent" organisms. If you have images of any of these critters, we'd be glad to post them under your name. You can take a look at the " Contribute Pictures" link on the home page of any of the sites to see what organisms we have no images and could really use some help from some great photographers.

Aquatic Invasives by Graves Lovell

We have a great new set of images from Graves Lovell. He has posted more than 500 images of aquatic invasive species in Alabama. Many of these images are also available on Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources website, but there are some additional images of these troublesome species. Take a look at all of his images on his photographer's profile page on Invasive.org.

How prepared is the U.S. to meet future botanical challenges?

The Chicago Botanic Garden and Botanic Gardens Conservation International 's U.S. office are working with partners across the country to assess current and future botanical capacity in the United States. The aim of this grant-funded project is to understand the resources we currently have to conserve and manage native plant species and habitat, identify gaps in capacity and highlight opportunities to fill them in the future. A summary report will be released in mid-2010 and freely available from this website.

If you are involved in plant science research, education or natural resource management in the United States, here is the Survey.