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Chapter 1: Birth A young scientist – let’s call her Alex – and her enthusiastic sidekick load up a Jeep Cherokee with an herbarium press and paper bags. They are heading off to the mountains of

Why does biodiversity matter? This is the sort of question that feels so immense, so integral to our scientific endeavors that it can be surprisingly challenging to articulate, though the conservation

Attaching an appropriate species name to a mushroom can be a surprisingly challenging task. Like most organisms, fungi have been primarily classified by their morphology, the physical characteristics

Botanists rely on external traits like leaf shape or flower size to make comparisons among plants and categorize them into taxonomic groups such as species or families. As a Ph.D. student in the

Did you know that anyone with an internet connection can take a virtual tour of the Gardens’ natural history collections? Our collections hold plant, fungal and arthropod specimens – organisms

For the last two summers, Denver Botanic Gardens has been conducting a floristic inventory of Denver Mountain Park’s newest property, Axton Ranch Mountain Park. Just what is a floristic inventory

Nestled in the heart of the Freyer – Newman Center is an unassuming lab doing big things for plant science and restoration efforts. Since the Center’s opening in 2020 multiple research projects have

Little is known about how Sclerocactus species spread their seed. This is a question we would like to answer because Sclerocactus glaucus has been recommended for delisting from the Endangered Species

In 2008, Denver Botanic Gardens initiated demographic monitoring of Sclerocactus glaucus, a small ball cactus found only in western Colorado. The cactus had been listed as threated on the Endangered

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

If you’re going to be planting plants, you are going to need seeds. Do you know where your seeds come from? When land managers consider putting native plants into natural landscapes to restore

On April 10, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) announced a proposed rule to remove Sclerocactus glaucus, a small barrel cactus found in the Colorado and Gunnison River Basins in Western