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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts by Grace Costantino

Blog Reel, User Stories

“BHL is a Game Changer for Scholars”: BHL Empowers Research on Landscape Gardening History

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The large-leaved kōwhai (Sophora tetraptera) is native to the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, where it is widespread and common. While it grows naturally only in Aotearoa, it has been cultivated extensively outside of this range, including as one of a number of New Zealand plants historically introduced into English gardens.

Natural history literature provides a record of such introductions, with many authors remarking on the suitability of Sophora tetraptera—often referring to it under the synonym Edwardsia grandiflora—to the English climate. For example George Loddiges, within his The Botanical Cabinet(1826), remarked that it was “sufficiently hardy to bear our climate, planted against a wall; in very severe frost, a mat should be hung over it.” Two decades later, British writer and botanical authority Jane Wells Webb Loudon included the plant in herThe Ladies’ Flower-Garden of Ornamental Greenhouse Plants (1848), where she noted that the original plant could still be found growing in Chelsea Garden in 1848.

Loddiges’ and Loudon’s references are just two of many sources related to the history of Sophora tetraptera that Mark Laird (Professor, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto) identified thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) whilst conducting research for a prospective book. One of the book’s chapters explores a variety of New Zealand plants introduced into English gardens from the 1770s to 1840s, in the context of both Kew’s colonial collecting and Māori heritage. BHL was an invaluable resource for this research—especially during the COVID-19 related lockdowns of 2020.

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August 12, 2021byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

Backswimmers vs. Mosquitos: BHL Informs Research on Controlling Yellow Fever Mosquito Populations

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Aedes aegypti, dubbed the yellow fever mosquito, is a globally invasive, pervasive threat to human health. As the common name suggests, the species can carry a range of diseases, including not only yellow fever but also dengue, the Zika virus, and the chikungunya virus. It is responsible for an estimated 400 million infections each year.

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July 8, 2021byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

Chronicling the History of the Former Squires of Coulsdon: Rare Book Digitization Informs Research on the Byron Family

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The Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C. is home to many rare and special books. Amongst the approximately 20,000 volumes in the library’s collection is a particularly rare item—one of only six known copies in public and institutional libraries worldwide.

The book is a privately printed journal by Edmund Byron entitled What we did in South Africa in 1873, which details Byron and his wife Charlotte’s 1873 exploratory and hunting expedition to South Africa. In 2015, at the request of a researcher, the Smithsonian digitized its copy of the journal and made it freely available online in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), where it was discovered by Dr. Nigel Elliott, who was conducting research on the Byron family.

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June 10, 2021byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

BHL Quarterly Newsletter (May 2021) Now Available!

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Our latest quarterly newsletter is now available! From a recap of the 2021 BHL Annual Meeting to recordings from BHL Day 2021 and an introduction to our new Persistent Identifier Working Group, don’t miss the latest news from the BHL community.

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May 17, 2021byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

Language of Flowers Virtual Symposium on 30 April 2021

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On 30 April 2021, join the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Lenhardt Library and the Caxton Club for a free, virtual symposium celebrating the Language of Flowers—a popular literary trend in the 19th century that presented the world of botany through dictionaries of flowers and associated meanings, floral poetry and prose, offering a sentimental view of natural history.

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April 8, 2021byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, User Stories

Hidden Biodiversity: Exploring Neotropical Fungus Weevils With the Help of BHL

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In the last decades of the 19th century, a monumental publication on the biodiversity of Mexico and Central America began publication—Biologia Centrali-Americana. Published in 215 parts from 1879 to 1915 by the editors Frederick DuCane Godman and Osbert Salvin, the work describes over 50,000 species and is illustrated with over 1,600 lithographic plates depicting over 18,000 species. Remarkable for its time, the title is still vitally important for the study of Neotropical biodiversity today, as it contained virtually all known information at the time about Mexican and Central American flora and fauna.

Biologia Centrali-Americana is a particularly important resource for entomologist Samanta Orellana, a PhD student in evolutionary biology at the Dr. Nico Franz Lab of Arizona State University (ASU) and a research assistant in the ASU Biocollections of the Biodiversity Knowledge Integration Center. Orellana began studying insects and working with entomological collections more than a decade ago, during her undergraduate studies in her home country of Guatemala.

“For many insect groups in Guatemala and the rest of Central America, Biologia Centrali-Americana still represents the only source of information available for the region,” states Orellana.

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April 6, 2021byGrace Costantino
BHL News, Blog Reel

Join Us on 16 April 2021 for Notes from Nature: The Biodiversity Heritage Collections

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Join us for a special closing event presented as part of the 2021 BHL Annual Meeting!

Notes from Nature: The Biodiversity Heritage Collections
Date and Time: Friday, 16 April 2021 @ 1130-1230 UTC
Location: Online (via Zoom webinar)

Discover the natural world through a vast collection of biodiversity knowledge online. Find out how Singapore and France have worked together across boundaries to advance biodiversity literature, digitisation and public outreach efforts.

This discussion is organised by the National Library Singapore and Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, France in partnership with the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the world’s largest open access online repository of biodiversity knowledge.

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March 30, 2021byGrace Costantino
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About BHL

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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