Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from 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
  • 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
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
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with women-in-science

Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Her Natural History

Museum für Naturkunde Explores Maria Sibylla Merian’s Legacy and Editions of Her Metamorphosis

Read the full blog post

Three hundred and seventy-four years ago on 2 April 1647, a remarkable woman was born: the artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian. In the 17th and 18th century world of male-dominated science, Merian had to fight for her place in the natural sciences. Against all odds, she became a trailblazer, especially in developmental biology.

Merian’s legacy was recently explored during a 4-week student-project at the library of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. The project was part of a master’s program for the University of Applied Science in Leipzig to enlarge the student’s experience in the historical holding field and give a glimpse into the planning and conducting of a project. The aim of the project itself was and is the digitization of two different editions of Merian’s work Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium as well as a restorative and provenance research summary about the volumes. Both editions show Merian’s talent in painting and observing insects and plants.

Continue reading
June 3, 2021byAntonia Trojok
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Earth Day 2021: Exploring Earth’s Biodiversity through Books

Read the full blog post

Since its inaugural event on 22 April 1970, Earth Day has grown to an international annual celebration of the Earth and a movement to raise awareness about and support for environmental protection. This year’s theme, Restore Our Earth, emphasizes that, “As the world returns to normal, we can’t go back to business-as-usual.” As we face widespread climate change and unprecedented biodiversity declines—with more than a million species threatened with extinction—immediate, online access to essential literature is ever-more important, allowing scientists to conduct research more quickly and efficiently and improving our ability to respond to these crises. For fifteen years, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has worked as a global consortium to provide this vital access, empower research, and make a real difference in our ability to improve the health of our planet for every species that calls it home.

This year, several of our global partners have selected a few titles and authors from the BHL collection to commemorate Earth Day. From exploring Asia’s vast and unique biodiversity to inspiring conservation through a popular publication on birds, providing practical methods for conducting surveys and using the data to support conservation practices, and marveling at the extraordinary biodiversity of past ages, these titles highlight the richness of our planet’s biodiversity and remind us of the importance of protecting the wonderful, wild, and beautiful life on Earth.

Continue reading
April 22, 2021byContributors to Earth Day 2021 Feature
Blog Reel, User Stories

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

Read the full blog post

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.

Continue reading
April 6, 2021byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Her Natural History

Graceanna Lewis: A Naturalist and Abolitionist

Read the full blog post

“To her mind the truths of science seem revealed.”

That’s how Phebe A. Hanaford, author of Daughters of America (c. 1882), described naturalist Graceanna Lewis, one of the first three woman to be accepted into the Academy of Natural Sciences. But Lewis was not only one of the first professionally acknowledged women naturalists; she was also an abolitionist and social reformer who worked for the advancement of science as well as human rights. Researchers can find many publications by and about this intriguing woman in the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ Digital Library and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Continue reading
March 30, 2021byErin Rushing
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books, Her Natural History

Margaret S. Collins: A Legend in Termite Field Biology

Read the full blog post

Dr. Margaret S. Collins (1922-1996), a renowned expert on termite ecology and distribution, taught as a professor and administrator at Howard University, Florida A&M University, and Federal City College (now University of The District of Columbia) for over 35 years. Upon her retirement from teaching, Collins continued her work on termites at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as a research associate from 1983 to 1996.

Over the course of her career, Collins published more than forty articles spanning the biogeography, physiology, chemical defenses, and taxonomy of termites. Collins also collected specimens in the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Barbados, Belize, Suriname, the Cayman Islands, Guyana, Guatemala, and Panama. When she contracted dengue fever on an expedition in Guyana in 1983-1984 and was forced into a long hiatus from field work, she turned her focus to updating and preserving the termite specimens at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Eventually Collins returned to field research in 1994 when she once again traveled to Guyana to collect termites. In April 1996, Collins died while conducting field work in the Cayman Islands.

Continue reading
March 22, 2021byDr. Elizabeth Harmon
Blog Reel, User Stories

Women in Historical SciArt: BHL Empowers Research on Women in Scientific Illustration

Read the full blog post

Michelle Marshall is an independent researcher and creator of Historical SciArt, a research initiative dedicated to women in historic scientific illustration. In this guest post, Marshall shares more about how BHL helps empower her research on women in science.

Continue reading
March 16, 2021byMichelle L. Marshall
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Earth Optimism 2020, Her Natural History

The Conservationism of a Nature Educator: Anna Botsford Comstock

Read the full blog post

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.

Continue reading
August 6, 2020byKaren Penders St. Clair, Ph.D.
Page 1 of 51234»...Last »

Help Support BHL

BHL’s existence depends on the financial support of its patrons. Help us keep this free resource alive!

Donate Now

search

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.”

Follow BHL

Join Our Mailing List

Sign up to receive the latest news, content highlights, and promotions.

Subscribe Now

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Subscribe to Blog Via RSS

Subscribe to the blog RSS feed to stay up-to-date on all the latest BHL posts.

Access RSS Feed

BHL on Twitter

Tweets by @BioDivLibrary

Inspiring Discovery through Free Access to Biodiversity Knowledge.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library makes it easier than ever for you to access the information you need to study and explore life on Earth…for free, anytime, anywhere.

60+ Million Pages of
Biodiversity Literature Online.

EXPLORE

Tools and Services
to Transform Research.

EXPLORE

300,000+
Illustrations on Flickr.

EXPLORE

 

ABOUT | BLOG AUTHORS | HARMFUL CONTENT | PRIVACY | SITE MAP | TERMS OF USE

Download Adobe Acrobat Reader