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Denver Botanic Gardens houses more than 100,000 preserved plant, fungal and insect specimens that are used for a multitude of purposes including scientific study. As part of my job as the collection's

Author Sherry Anderson has a quote that sums up the value of volunteers quite well: “Volunteers don’t get paid, not because they’re worthless, but because they’re priceless.” We in the Research &

While walking along a trail in Denver, I appreciated that I had access to nature while within city limits. I noticed large cottonwoods with birds chirping in the branches and delicate pollinators

The City Nature Challenge is a yearly event for folks in cities all over the world to observe and document biodiversity in their own backyards. To participate, people make observations of any organism

Effective conservation requires baseline information on how a species exists in its environment. Rare species contribute to our global biodiversity like the Avery Peak Twinpod ( Physaria alpina)

Shrublands exist all around us, thriving in almost any environmental condition, from the desiccating sunshine of the endless sagebrush steppe to the deep, private shade of moist forests. These diverse

Since starting as the collections assistant last October, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of getting to know the volunteers working in the Gardens’ natural history collections. Each has their own

Join your community in documenting biodiversity during the City Nature Challenge! Having started as a friendly competition in California, the global challenge, now in its 9th year, has grown to

The prairie teams with wildlife. This diverse and inspiring ecosystem supports a wide variety of plants and animals. Prairie dogs scurry between their burrows while the first wildflowers of the season

A demographic study of a plant population is usually a low-tech job. We drive and hike to a rare plant population. To measure the survival, growth and reproductive rates of the population, we

Last summer one of the projects I was most excited about was a biodiversity survey at a golf club. “At a golf club?!” you say. That’s right! Ballyneal Golf Club, situated near Holyoke, Colorado, on

DNA contains the information that can help create a plan for conserving populations of rare plants in decline, inform strategies for restoring degraded ecosystems, identify species, describe new