2022 Meetings now in person
2022 EVENTS
Friday September 23rd - 7:30 - 9:30 pm - Albert McCormick Community Centre
Biographic note: Dr. David Galbraith
Head of Science, Royal Botanical Gardens, Burlington, Ontario
David grew up in Kitchener-Waterloo, completing his B.Sc and M.Sc. at University of Guelph and Ph.D. at Queen’s University. His early research focused on evolutionary ecology. Following a post-doctoral fellowship in Canterbury, England, David was appointed director of a small centre for endangered species. In 1995 he joined Royal Botanical Gardens (in Hamilton and Burlington) to develop conservation and biodiversity projects in response to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity. In 2006 he became RBG’s Head of Science, overseeing the library, archives, and herbarium, research, and use of RBG resources by outside researchers. David was named Hamilton Environmentalist of the Year in 2010. He has always had a deep love of biology, history, cultural heritage, and the arts, and is RBG’s informal historian. He is an adjunct biology professor at McMaster University, a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and a Fellow International of the Explorers Club. He’s currently editing a multi-volume set of books on the role of botanical gardens in plant conservation world-wide.
Title: Connecting People, Plants, and the Planet: Botanical Gardens in Conservation and the Environment
Botanical gardens arose in Renaissance Italy as teaching and research tools, and over the ensuing centuries proliferated and became more diverse. Today over 3,000 institutions globally self-identify as botanical gardens. Since the 1980s increasing efforts have brought botanical gardens capacities to bear on biodiversity, environmental issues, and conservation. These efforts have led to the first on-line flora of the world’s plants, networks combatting invasive species, consortia sharing collection data, endangered plant recovery projects, and increasing involvement in ecological restoration and conservation-related education. We’ll review the development of botanical gardens in Canada and around the world, and consider how they are responding to the biodiversity and climate change crisis in a world in which 100,000 of the 400,000 wild plant species are now at risk of extinction. We’ll also look at how local efforts and interest in plants can support sustainability and improve well-being whether a botanical garden is near-by or not.
Biographic note: Dr. David Galbraith
Head of Science, Royal Botanical Gardens, Burlington, Ontario
David grew up in Kitchener-Waterloo, completing his B.Sc and M.Sc. at University of Guelph and Ph.D. at Queen’s University. His early research focused on evolutionary ecology. Following a post-doctoral fellowship in Canterbury, England, David was appointed director of a small centre for endangered species. In 1995 he joined Royal Botanical Gardens (in Hamilton and Burlington) to develop conservation and biodiversity projects in response to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity. In 2006 he became RBG’s Head of Science, overseeing the library, archives, and herbarium, research, and use of RBG resources by outside researchers. David was named Hamilton Environmentalist of the Year in 2010. He has always had a deep love of biology, history, cultural heritage, and the arts, and is RBG’s informal historian. He is an adjunct biology professor at McMaster University, a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and a Fellow International of the Explorers Club. He’s currently editing a multi-volume set of books on the role of botanical gardens in plant conservation world-wide.
Title: Connecting People, Plants, and the Planet: Botanical Gardens in Conservation and the Environment
Botanical gardens arose in Renaissance Italy as teaching and research tools, and over the ensuing centuries proliferated and became more diverse. Today over 3,000 institutions globally self-identify as botanical gardens. Since the 1980s increasing efforts have brought botanical gardens capacities to bear on biodiversity, environmental issues, and conservation. These efforts have led to the first on-line flora of the world’s plants, networks combatting invasive species, consortia sharing collection data, endangered plant recovery projects, and increasing involvement in ecological restoration and conservation-related education. We’ll review the development of botanical gardens in Canada and around the world, and consider how they are responding to the biodiversity and climate change crisis in a world in which 100,000 of the 400,000 wild plant species are now at risk of extinction. We’ll also look at how local efforts and interest in plants can support sustainability and improve well-being whether a botanical garden is near-by or not.
