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Robert Dale Kloppenburg is definitely a dedicated botanist. As of January 2018 – when he celebrated his 97th birthday – he has named 234 plant species, mainly in the flowering genus Hoya, which has been his focus for close to forty years since his retirement. Kloppenburg and the International Hoya Association, of which he is president, have made some generous contributions to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, with funding of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project.

The LuEsther T. Mertz Library at the New York Botanical Garden is one of many partners on the Biodiversity Heritage Library Field Notes Project which was generously funded by the Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR). As its contribution to the project, NYBG selected 91 field notebooks for digitization. Nine different collectors are represented in the selected volumes. The bulk of the selected volumes — a total of 61 — document the botanical collecting of Dr. Arthur Cronquist (1919-1992), a pre-eminent twentieth-century American botanist who spent most of his career at NYBG.

During the final quarter of 2017 (October to December), BHL received permission for 44 new in-copyright titles, many as part of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project. Below are the titles added in the fourth quarter, in the order permission was secured. As of the writing of this post, only one has been uploaded; the link is provided. Look for the rest as they’re added to the collection; you can check the recent additions, or see all the permission titles available in BHL on the permissions page.

The Acclimatisation Society of Victoria played a fascinating, yet devastating, role in Australia’s ecological history. Founded in 1861 and existing as an independent entity until 1872, the Society recorded its objectives and activities in annual reports. These reports have been digitized by Museums Victoria and are now available on the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The New York Academy of Medicine Library has contributed nine digitized titles (11 volumes) on medical botany to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) as part of the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature project. It is very exciting to share some of the Academy Library’s botanical resources with the wider public.

The Harvard Botany Libraries have been fortunate to benefit from several field notes digitization projects in recent years. Materials have been selected based on condition, demand, and/or the theme of the funded project. The current CLIR-funded BHL Field Notes Project has enabled us to nearly complete the capture of field notes and plant lists associated with the herbaria collections. The most interesting and immediate benefit of the project is our ability to point users to the files that are available both in the Biodiversity Heritage Library and HOLLIS, Harvard’s online catalog.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has spent the past fifty years working on a complex ecological problem. The Chesapeake Bay is an estuary in Maryland, Delaware, D.C. and Virginia. While about half of its water comes from the Atlantic Ocean, the rest flows to the bay from 64,000 square miles of watershed – spanning 6 states and home to over 18 million people. Pollution from sewage, agriculture, and industry (as well as other impacts of human development) have degraded the bay’s water quality, damaging biodiversity as well as human health, economics, and recreation. Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) is a private sector group using many approaches to tackle this regional issue.