NYBG Scientists Travel the World for New Species
In the last year, as with every year, NYBG scientists have spent days, weeks, and months wandering the globe in the search for undiscovered plant species, working to bring our understanding of the world around us just a little closer to complete. And they're getting the job done. The last 12 months brought to light 81 new plant and fungi species described to science by our experts, found from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. Of these 81, the findings resulted in two new plant orders and four new genera.
These 81 new species will become part of a database spanning over 400,000 currently described, in a push not only to educate us about their existence, but to benefit their preservation.
"This impressive collection of new species from around the world that Garden scientists discovered and described in just one year is a testament of their dedication to one of our central goals–finding and cataloging all of the plant life on Earth," said Dr. James Miller, the Garden's Dean and Vice President for Science. "A significant percentage of plant species are in serious decline, and probably a large number of them are species we haven't even discovered yet," he added. "We're working as quickly and as efficiently as we can to catalog these species, but it's a race against time."