The Fort Worth Botanic Garden|Botanical Research Institute of Texas (FWBG|BRIT) has  received two National Science Foundation (NSF) grants totaling $1.9 million to support botanists and their research teams in plant diversity studies at home and abroad.

“These grants are an endorsement by the NSF of the excellent reputations of our scientists and the quality of their research,” says President and Executive Director Ed Schneider. “Both of these projects seek to answer fundamental questions about plant diversity and distribution. They are foundational to our work as botanists.”

Research botanist Alejandra Vasco’s project will take her team into remote parts of Colombia to study ferns, and she says, “There is so much still left to learn about the diversity of plants on Earth, and understanding this diversity is urgent because it forms the basis of conservation planning efforts.”

Vice President of Research and Director of the Herbarium Peter Fritsch’s team will study a popular food crop, saying, “Blueberries have an uncertain evolutionary history, and we don’t even have a clear picture of how many wild species there are or how all of the species differ from one another.”

For more information, visit brit.org/blog/two-new-nsf-grants.