Research spotlights

An international team of botanists from Madagascar, Brazil, France and the Bavarian State Collection for Botany (SNSB-BSM) have discovered and described a new carnivorous plant from the genus Drosera (sundews). The new species Drosera arachnoides is found only in Madagascar. The scientists have now published a detailed description of the new plant species in the […]

In the new National Research Data Infrastructure for Biodiversity (NFDI4Biodiversity), the Bavarian Natural History Collections (SNSB) and its SNSB IT Center are one of 13 equal partner institutions. NFDI4BioDiversity is one of nine NFDI consortia funded on the recommendation of the German Research Foundation (DFG). This decision was announced by the Joint Science Conference last […]

During an inventory, a scientist at the Bavarian State Collection of Botany (SNSB-BSM) made a surprising discovery: a 142-year-old slide containing a blood sample that came from a cow infected with the anthrax pathogen Bacillus anthracis. Scientists at the Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology (IMB) were able to decode the oldest documented genome of B. anthracis […]

SNSB botanist Andreas Fleischmann rediscovered the previously unknown original herbarium record from the description of the oblong-leaved sundew (Drosera intermedia) from 1798 – due to the match of the dried plant with the illustration from the original publication and subsequent research. Fleischmann and a colleague have now published their findings in the botanical journal Taxon. […]

Everywhere, yet superficially inconspicuous – lichens colonize trees or rocks all over the world. However, these creatures perform amazing stuff in secret: Among other things, they produce substances that are of great interest to the pharmaceutical industry. Researchers at the Bavarian State Collection for Botany (SNSB-BSM) and the Technical University of Munich for the first […]

Little is known about the biodiversity of plants of the Bohemian Forest (Šumava). The research project “Flora of the Bohemian Forest”, which has been launched, aims to comprehensively investigate the plant diversity in this biologically unique area. Cooperation partners of the project are the Bavarian Natural History Collections (SNSB) with the SNSB IT Center, and […]

Lichens are among the first organisms to recolonize rocks or stony soils after glacial retreat. Researchers from the Bavarian State Collection for Botany (SNSB-BSM), among others, studied lichen vegetation after the melting of ice masses in Antarctica. The scientists published their results in early May in the scientific journal Symbiosis. Climate change has a major […]

Bavarian State Ministry for the Environment and Consumer Protection, Bavarian State Collection for Botany & SNSB IT Center With around 14 million records of over 4,000 plant species occurring in Bavaria, the new plant portal has grown to become the largest botanical database in Bavaria. From this, a comprehensive plant atlas “Flora of Bavaria” will […]

GBIF.org, as the largest global network for biodiversity data, passed the 1 billion mark of digital evidence on species distribution on 04 July 2018. This milestone symbolizes the great collective achievement of the Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), an initiative established in response to an OECD recommendation in 1999 and currently supported by governments from 123 […]

Deschampsia rhenana is found only at Lake Constance- unfortunately possibly not for much longer. Because the sweet grass species is critically endangered. Until around the year 2000, there were still large populations of the species on the shores of Lake Constance in Bavaria, but then these declined significantly and disappeared completely from 2005 onwards. In […]