All posts in Blog Reel

Given their strong association with the area, you might be surprised to learn that there is only one species of palm native to the entire state of California — the California fan palm (Washingtonia filifera), native to the southwestern United States and northwest Mexico. It is one of two recognized species in the genus Washingtonia, the other being the Mexican fan palm (Washingtonia robusta), native to western Sonora and Baja California Sur in northwestern Mexico. Both are among the palm tree species found in L.A., with the Mexican fan palm in particular reaching exceptional heights throughout the city.

Dr. Lorena Villanueva-Almanza, outreach coordinator at the California Botanical Society, specializes in the Washingtonia genus. As a plant taxonomist, her work focuses on understanding plant relationships and the many ways and names under which plants have been described across time — something she is currently engaged in for the Washingtonia. BHL is an invaluable resource for this work.

The conservation movement today encompasses more than the physical management of habitat to preserve plants and animals. Richard Evans Schultes (1915-2001) epitomized the modern conservationist by coupling his taxonomic work on plants with research on the botanical knowledge and culture of local people. Known as the “father of ethnobotany” Schultes spent almost fourteen years deep within the rainforests of the Amazon learning from multiple Indigenous tribes about their languages, medicines, and relationships to plants.

Anna Botsford Comstock (1854-1930) held a significant role as a proponent of nature education at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, at the turn of the 20th century. Comstock was born in New York State, the only child to Quaker parents at the edge of the pioneer era. The doctrine of her parents, Marvin and Phoebe Botsford, was one of appreciating a higher creation in all things natural. It is in this philosophy in which a young Comstock was raised, and it was her mother who particularly influenced her child’s curiosity, and knowledge, of the surrounding natural wonders of the world.

German-born forester Wilhelm Schlich (1840-1925) helped establish forestry as a scientific discipline in Great Britain. He emphasized sustainable forestry practices and the importance of preserving the productive power of the soil as a silvicultural objective.

On 9 March 2020, New York University announced that it was taking classes remote, and less than two weeks later the entire campus, including our beloved Bobst Library, shut down. While I was relieved that the university was taking the pandemic seriously and acting quickly to flatten the curve, the shut-down posed serious challenges not just to teaching but to research for both me and my students.

Thoreau the writer.  Thoreau the philosopher.  Thoreau the naturalist.  Thoreau the citizen.

The myriad of Henry David Thoreau’s titles demonstrates the fusion of interests that propelled his path toward becoming one of the key naturalist figures in history. Classic works like Walden and Civil Disobedience brought Thoreau literary renown as he proclaimed the philosophies of Transcendentalism and environmentalism. As a naturalist, his records of field specimens amassed in journals both while living at Walden Pond and long after. Though praised for his place in the American literary canon, he also made significant contributions to the scientific community. His field notes and data are now helping scientists learn more about species’ resilience, the effects of climate change, and the historical landscape of New England.

BHL has deployed a new taxonomic name finding tool to improve the speed and accuracy of identifying names throughout its 58+ million pages.

BHL is now usingGlobal Names Architecture’s (GNA) gnfinder tool to locate taxonomic names in the BHL corpus. Prior to this deployment, BHL’s name finding services were based on an index of scientific names created by GNA developers six years ago by parsing every page in BHL one by one. This took 45 days to accomplish, and the cost of repeating this process made updating or improving the index infeasible.

The gnfinder tool uses fast, scalable programming languages to significantly reduce computational time. Using Open Source applications in Go and Scala, the tool detects candidate scientific names and compares them to millions of scientific name-strings aggregated by GNA for verification. The new process decreases the time needed for name detection and name verification from 35 days to 5 hours and from 7 days to 12 hours, respectively. As a result, the entire BHL corpus can now be indexed in less than a day, compared to the 45 days needed for the previous index. Additionally, by significantly reducing computational time, implementing iterative improvements to the index is now achievable.