Global Plants at the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections

We were delighted to see so many partners and presentations about Global Plants at the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) meeting in June in Berlin!

Thanks to the generosity of Panama-based Smithsonian Institution Tropical Research Institute and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we were able to provide funds as travel stipends for representatives of Global Plants partner institutions to attend SPNHC. The recipients included:

• Maria Mercedes Arbo (National Scientific and Technical Research Council IBONE – Instituto de Botánica del Nordeste)
• Fiseha Getachew (Addis Ababa University)
• Itambo Malombe (National Museums of Kenya)
• Lauren Raz (Universidad Nacional de Colombia)
• Pierre A.R. Radji (University of Lome, Togo)
• Helga Ochoterena (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Biología)
• Jeanine Velez Gavilan (University of Puerto Rico)

In addition to supporting individual travel grants, we held a Global Plants Steering Committee meeting and a second, open-invitation meeting of our Global Plants database content-contributing partner institutions at the Botanischer Garten und Botanisches Museum Berlin on June 25th, in conjunction with the SPNHC meeting. This was an opportunity not only to engage with our partner community, but also to begin conversations with attending natural history museum directors, curators, and a wide range of scientists about licensing our journals and books in natural history, entomology, mammalogy, ornithology, and general zoology.