Simon’s Rock Alum Hannah Wheeler Achieves Botanical Milestone
GREAT BARRINGTON, MA —
Simon’s Rock alum Hannah Wheeler, ‘20, has recently achieved a milestone during her work in partnership with the New York Botanical Garden: digitizing the 300,000th All Asia project specimen, and the completion of barcoding the last remaining family for the project.
Wheeler, a Digitization Intern at the Botanical Garden in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City, was previously a Greenhouse Technician as a student at Simon’s Rock and learned plant and specimen identification, collection, and maintenance — all necessary skills for her current position as a helping hand responsible for cataloging botanical specimens in the Garden.
As the largest continent on earth, Asia contains a rich diversity of landscapes and habitats with more than one-third of the world’s 350,000 plant species growing within, including medicinal herbs, ancient crops, and some of the planet’s tallest rainforest trees. Until recent years, documentation of this botanical diversity remained inaccessible due to difficulties in research; digitization of the specimens of Asian plants had not yet been digitized. The All Asia Thematic Collections Network (TCN) has worked to digitize the 15 million specimens of Asian plants currently housed in the US and around the world.
Hannah Wheeler has recently helped electronically catalogue the next milestone specimen: a Gesneriaceae, a horticultural marvel cultivated for its striking foliage and flowers, collected by NYBG Curator Robert Statham Williams from the Philippines in 1903.
Read about Hannah’s exciting contributions to the New York Botanical Garden and the All Asia project.