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Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was a man who believed all of nature was interconnected, and that by affecting one aspect of nature, other parts of nature would be affected, too—for good or ill. Humboldt believed that one’s own emotions and subjective views were necessary in order to completely experience nature. Simply taking measurements or classifying animals, plants, rocks and other forms of life would never allow one to fully experience the truth of nature.

We are honored to celebrate the career of Susan Fraser, who last month retired as the Thomas J. Hubbard Vice President and Director of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library at The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG). During her 36 years at NYBG, Susan made significant contributions to the Garden, the global library and botanical community, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).

Earlier this year Dr. Simon Leslie, Francis Houssemayne du Boulay’s great-grandson, contacted Melbourne Museum about accessing du Boulay’s hand-painted Coleoptera volumes, held in the Museums Victoria Archives. Dr. Leslie and family accessed the physical volumes in February 2020. While I carefully supervised flipping through the pages of these volumes, I was intrigued by their aesthetic, and scientific and historic, value. Since then, the volumes have been digitised by Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) Australia.

Lidia Ponce de la Vega is a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies at McGill University. As part of her dissertation, she is analyzing the BHL collection from the perspective of Latin America to understand how the region produces and engages with biodiversity knowledge and how knowledge of Latin American biodiversity produced elsewhere represents the region and its nature. As part of this process, she has conducted a critical study of the BHL México program to understand how users in Latin America engage with BHL’s collections as well as how the program can help decolonise biodiversity knowledge and help inform best practices for decolonising digital archives more broadly.

Little Lake Valley, located in northern California’s Eel River watershed, is home to several thousand acres of wet meadows and riparian woodlands that are habitat for diverse plants and wildlife, including tule elk, many bird species, and gorgeous spring wildflower displays. A landscape formed when sediments from several creeks filled an intermountain valley bounded by faults, the Valley is also home to two rare plants: the North Coast semaphore grass (state-listed as Threatened) and Baker’s meadowfoam (state-listed as Rare).

“The large lowland wetland ecosystem found in the Little Lake Valley, if not unique, is quite rare,” asserts Dr. Robert E. Preston, a Senior Biologist in the Sacramento office of ICF, an international consulting firm. “Most or all of the small interior valleys of California’s North Coast Ranges were long ago converted to agriculture or were hydrologically altered. Moreover, it supports almost half of the known occurrences of Baker’s meadowfoam, including the largest and most extensive population.”

In November 2016, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) completed construction of the Willits Bypass Project, a 5.9-mile long bypass of US Highway 101 in Mendocino County. First proposed in 1957, the controversial project, which crosses a corner of Little Lake Valley, raised a variety of environmental concerns due to its impact on endangered species and state and federally regulated resources [1].

Preston served as the lead botanist for the team that prepared the Project’s Mitigation and Monitoring Plan, which was developed and is being implemented by Caltrans to offset the bypass’ impacts on wetlands and rare plants.

George Perkins Marsh was a talented linguist, scholar, and diplomat. He served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Vermont’s 3rd district from 1843-1849, and, in 1850, went on to become United States Minister to the Ottoman Empire. In 1861 he was appointed by President Lincoln as the first Ambassador to the Kingdom of Italy, where he served until his death at Vallombrosa in 1882. A Vermonter raised close to the forests of the Adirondack Mountains, Marsh is remembered today chiefly for his role as an early and influential pioneer of the conservation movement in the United States. His book Man and Nature:Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, published in 1864, is recognized for his early recognition of the interdependency of the natural world, the effects that human actions can have upon it, and the responsibilities that humans bear for those actions.

In our latest newsletter, we share some of the ways we have been working to improve the Library over the past few months, such as deploying a new taxonomic name finding tool and making our records available in WorldCat. Additionally, with many of our partners now operating in a telework environment, we have focused on projects to improve our digital collections remotely, such as uploading born digital content, improving collection metadata, and building our image collections on Flickr.

Check out our latest quarterly newsletter to learn more.