Explore UConn's impressive botanical conservatory in-person or virtually
Students from Mansfield Middle School tour the UConn Botanical Conservatory, part of the Biodiversity Research Collections in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, on June 3, 2024. (Bri Diaz/UConn Photo)
The UConn Botanical Conservatory is an impressive resource for the University community and beyond, and after a two-year collaboration between the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB), the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), and the Institutional Insights and Innovation (i3) team, the conservatory's reach has expanded further. In addition to being the largest and most diverse facility of its kind in the Northeast and one of the three most diverse in the country, the conservatory now has a state-of-the-art database like no other.
It is more than an ordinary website, explains Cynthia Jones, professor emerita of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of the conservatory, because the i3 team was able to re-incorporate all of the previous database functionality with an updated design. The site is optimized so anyone can explore aspects of the collection by geographic and taxonomic detail, see what is currently flowering, and plan and schedule trips to the conservatory.
As a living laboratory and collection, the conservatory provides valuable support for teaching, research, conservation, and outreach. The new website will help enhance the conservatory's role in these efforts.
"This website is a world-class window into a world-class collection," says Jones.
The project improves on a previous website integrated with a database used for tracking and managing the collection. The new website has a contemporary look and will be much easier to update, while still providing a portal to the database used by the staff of the conservatory. From the perspective of i3 director of institutional innovation Joel Salisbury, whose team helps develop custom software for the UConn community, one of the challenges of working on ongoing projects like maintaining a database for a living collection is personnel turnover. For example, people retire or take new positions, students graduate, and in those absences, knowledge may be lost. The redesign required a lot of digging to understand the previous website's design.
"The website is one thing, but being able to launch the website coupled with software that we had to recreate without the subject matter knowledge that built it to begin with, that was completely foreign territory for us," says Salisbury.
These complicated aspects make projects like these even more exciting for the team, according to Salisbury.
"There's a beauty to the type of work [that is] born out of deep intimacy with the problems it was designed to solve. Though my team and I know how to build software, we don't understand the intricacies of the problem itself, so we are coming at it from a completely different angle," says Salisbury.
In addition to improving the usability of the data, the new site ensures that content is accessible and optimized for search, helping more people discover the resources available at UConn, says CLAS director of communications Bri Diaz. Plant growth facilities manager Meghan Moriarty recalls a recent example of this functionality where a researcher flew in from Michigan for a three-hour visit, where he collected tissue samples from the conservatory and promptly boarded a flight back home. The website meant he could see what was available to streamline the visit and collection process.
"He came for a whistle-stop tour to study different family plant families and was able to check dozens of species off the list after collecting living material here," says Moriarty.
Access to such an extensive living collection is a powerful research and teaching tool. Professor and EEB department head Elizabeth Jockusch says the conservatory enhances the teaching of systemic botany classes, where the traditional way of teaching typically relies on pressed herbarium specimens or whatever is currently growing in the region.
"Recently, the course has been taught almost exclusively based on living material in the greenhouses, and since flowers are important for taxonomy, instructors can check to see which families are blooming right now and compare floral structures," says Jockusch.
EEB assistant professor-in-residence Edward McAssey adds another example of the value of the conservatory and the expertise of the staff.
"I have an assignment where students are encouraged to learn about a plant and present to the class. I encourage the students to use the greenhouse as a class resource, where they can get inspiration and information for their assignments. I can see a lot of value in teaching with the website," says McAssey.
The website also helps with the sometimes challenging task of scheduling and planning tours, says Moriarty. Community groups and instructors from other institutions around the region visit the conservatory and the dynamic website is a crucial planning tool to see if the trip will be worth it in terms of seeing what is available with up-to-date information. Jones adds that the home page features a video giving visitors a short preview of what to expect when they visit.
Even if users are not planning a visit, Jones points out that studies show that plants can have a positive emotional effect on people, and that even perusing the website may be beneficial. The beautiful and functional website is also a huge bonus for researchers.
"Scientists will use whatever system to get them access to the data. We're used to old, clunky databases; they don't need to be pretty, they don't need to function easily, we might need to use a specialized vocabulary to query them," says Jockusch. "It's even better when if you can just pull up the list and then filter by what you're interested in."
Though the process of bringing the conservatory website to fruition was intense, Salisbury says it was a fascinating learning experience for everyone involved, and students including Leticia Fernandes '24 (SFA), Marisa Morenau '24 (SFA), Jack Medrek '25 (ENG), Lauren Busavage '26 (ENG) '26 (SFA), Jay Kittler '27 (ENG), and Phoebe Liou '26 (SFA) were instrumental in the process.
"Having students who were hands-on with this and who had to learn all about what it does and why before they could start building, the students loved that," says Salisbury. "While they learn a lot from us, we wouldn't be able to do it without the students, and they build a lot of cool stuff before they graduate."
Now that the project has come to fruition, Jones is hopeful that the website will elevate awareness about the conservatory.
"It's not easy to assemble a team like this to pull something off, but we managed to do it. Now we want to get the word out and hope more people will visit this beautiful website."
