From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2018.
The Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield Program (BDG) recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. This dynamic program seeks to document, study, and preserve the biological diversity of the Guiana Shield. The Shield is a natural area occupying the northeast corner of South America and has a rich and poorly explored biodiversity. Understanding diversity in the area is complicated by the fact that it encompasses six political units (Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and parts of Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil) and five languages. The Shield includes a wide variety of habitats including the unique "Lost World" tepuis and towering greenheart forests as well as savannas, lowland and montane forests, and coastal mangrove areas each of which has a complex interaction of plants and animals.
BDG has worked to explore this rich diversity and to make the information available and useful to the public and a variety of agencies. Although based in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History, the program has interacted with scientists in almost all of the Natural History biodiversity departments as well as the National Zoo, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.
To accomplish its goals, BDG has a worldwide network of collaborators. In fact, the program has worked with over 850 people in research, education, training, and outreach. These efforts have resulted in tens of thousands of new collections that have been used to address a variety of questions from the basic “What is it?” and “Where does it live/grow?” to synthetic ones, such as “What is it related to?”, “What are the levels of endemism?”, “Are there adaptive radiations?”, "Where are the highest areas of species richness and endemism?", "Where should future expeditions go?”, and others.
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