Botany Researcher Heidi Meudt and Collection Manager Antony Kusabs made new collections of forget-me-nots and other plants at some stunning but remote South Island sites in Feb 2020. Take a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to do remote field work, and enjoy some of the rewards of their hard work!Read more
Botany Researcher Heidi Meudt is on a mission to find and make new research collections of all native New Zealand forget-me-nots. It can be a challenge to find some of them, particularly if we don’t know a lot about them or where they are to be found. Read more
Field work is a key aspect of biodiversity research to locate and collect new specimens to study. Botany Researcher Heidi Meudt took two South Island field trips in Dec 2018 and Jan 2019 with two university students in tow. Combining research and training is often a great way to get scientific research done – but was it successful this time?Read more
What if we all had to work from home for an extended period? Many of the Natural History staff could research and write papers from home, but what about the people whose jobs normally involved handling specimens every day?Read more
A single specimen of toromiro – a close relative of our own kōwhai and extinct in the wild – has been discovered in our botany collection, where it’s been kept safe for 150 years.Read more
A new species of liverwort has just been identified in Wellington and named after local amateur botanist Rodney Lewington (1935–2018). Botanist Lara Shepherd tells us more about liverworts and Rodney’s contribution to New Zealand botany.Read more
Every year, Te Papa partners with Victoria University in their Summer Research Scholarships initiative. Here, we introduce them and the projects they worked on.Read more
What is an appropriate amount of change in our scientific classification of life? Botany Curator Leon Perrie ponders this using the kiokio and its fern relatives as an example.Read more
Read about Botanists Heidi Meudt and Antony Kusabs epic 14-day forget-me-not field work adventure. Highlights include solving a plant identification mystery and finding a plant that hadn’t been collected in almost a century.Read more
In December 2017, Te Papa Botanist Heidi Meudt was on the hunt for some uncommon forget-me-nots in two very special places in the central North Island.Read more
Toropapa has been confusing botanists for over 100 years because they show extreme variation in leaf shape – even between plants considered to be the same species from a single location.Read more
Bird experts Colin Miskelly and Alan Tennyson recently returned from a research trip to the subantarctic Auckland Islands. Although their main aim was to study birds, Botany Researcher Heidi Meudt sent them on a separate mission – to collect a rare flower.Read more
