Event description:
The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University has a fascinating founding history. Established by Harvard University in 1872, the Arboretum’s first director Charles Sprague Sargent turned to Frederick Law Olmsted, the renowned American landscape architect to create a magnificent landscape to house the scientific living collections of woody plants and integrate the grounds into the emerging system of public parks in Boston. The result in 1882: an indenture between Harvard and the City of Boston for 2,000 years. In essence, the Arnold Arboretum is forever.
With such an expansive time frame as a backdrop, everything from the Arnold’s responses to global change (including climate change), ex situ conservation work around the world, as well as future research directions are guided by a knowledge that most decisions will have reverberate for centuries to come. This lecture will focus on specific examples of how we at the Arnold Arboretum are planning for the near term and the very long term. “Tree time” really is different!.
About the speaker:
William “Ned” Friedman is a botanist, evolutionary biologist, and the Director of Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, a position he has held since 2011. He is also the Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and his research focuses on the evolutionary diversification of plants. A graduate of Oberlin College with a PhD in Botany from UC Berkeley, Friedman is dedicated to using the Arboretum’s extraordinary living collections to advance research, education, and public understanding of plants and biodiversity.
