Botanist

Since his childhood in South America, he has been passionate about studying plant life for ways to fight climate change, promote clean air and food supplies.

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Mauricio Diazgranados (MD) was born in Colombia, South America. 

CHILDHOOD

Always loving to spend extended time outdoors, MD once set off alone at age 18 – telling his parents, in advance, about his planned route and timing – on a solo ‘survival trip’ to accomplish several personal goals: (1) spend time immersing himself within – and learn about – a nearby ecosystem: the tropical highlands near Bogota; and (2) prove to himself that he could live an outdoor life, however briefly, by using his preparation, common sense and creative thinking. 

During this early science focused journey, MD had his first encounter with frailejones, oversized members of the sunflower family with thick stems and crowns of pointed, hairy leaves. Shrouded in the mists of cold, wet, nearly treeless tropic highlands called paramos, they evoke the Spanish monks for which they are named. 

MD still keeps photos from that three-day adventure, which ended with him hungry, soaked and rescued by farmers. 

EDUCATION

MD focused his post high school courses at Javeriana University in Columbia on botany and biology. He has also earned advanced education degrees at Kew Gardens in London, England and in the U.S. at Saint Louis University. 

A passion for paramos and their other-worldly plants never left MD, now age 48 (as of 2023), as he embarked on an intercontinental career path, taking research positions in Colombia and England before arriving in the Bronx section of New York City in June 2023. 

BOTANISTS AND ECOLOGISTS

A botanist is an expert in the scientific study of plants. Botanists may study plants’ physiological processes such as photosynthesis at the molecular level, the evolutionary history and relationships of plants or their current relationships with their environments. 

They may focus on the agricultural applications of plants used for food, fiber, fuel, turf, and cover crops, studying their responses to stresses from pests, disease and climate variations. They may also work on plant breeding to develop hardier strains. 

Plant ecologists study the relationships which plants have with their environments, each other, and the wildlife communities to which they belong. Their work focuses on conservation of native species, reducing the invasion of non-native exotic plants and improving the ecosystem services like clean air and erosion protection they provide. 

The important work of botanists is critical to environmental conservation. Their research helps determine how different plants may react to climate change.

Agricultural botanists work at the front lines of the food crisis and help increase supplies of medicines, fibers, and timber. 

WHAT IS A ‘BOTANICAL GARDEN’?

A botanical garden is a controlled and staffed institution for the maintenance of a living collection of plants under scientific management for the purposes of education, scientific research, conservation, and display. 

Typically, plants are labelled with their botanical names. It may contain specialist plant collections such as cacti and other succulent plants, herb gardens, plants from particular parts of the world, and so on. There may be greenhouses, shade houses, again with special collections such as tropical plants, alpine plants, or other exotic plants. 

FIRST ADULT JOB IS NEVER A BINDING CAREER COMMITMENT

As a recent university graduate, MD started as an intern at the Bogota Botanical Garden, where his dedication to scientific research and ability to use his educational knowledge plus common-sense judgment while managing complex projects quickly led to his promotion to leadership positions, interacting with both the Garden’s management and local politicians who had approved funding for many of the Garden’s scientific programs. 

CHALLENGE TO A CAREER IN SCIENCE: GOVERNMENT POLITICS

During construction of Bogota’s botanical garden’s new herbarium and greenhouse, a change in local political leadership (in Bogota but could happen anywhere) meant withdrawal of government financial support for at least those science projects. So, MD searched for a new opportunity to carry on his research, leading to him moving to London, England. 

SCIENCE RESEARCH MAY FOLLOW A PATH TO DIFFERENT COUNTRIES

As Research Leader at the Royal Botanic Gardens, known as the Kew Botanical Garden in London, England, MD built from scratch a program to study native Columbia plants, taking advantage of a peace agreement between England and Colombia that expanded possibilities for biological expeditions, eco-tourism, and the development of plant-based products. 

MD led Kew’s Nature-based Solutions Initiative, aiming to provide ways to address environmental and societal challenges such as climate change, poverty, food security, health, and biodiversity loss for the benefit of both society and nature. His accomplishments included leading a group of 84 researchers and 135 technicians and gardeners, carrying out 73 research projects with an annual operating budget for research of $4M. His concurrent responsibilities included strategic development and maintenance of science buildings, including the laboratory facilities, the gardens greenhouses (for research and visitors) and the herbarium. One project was planning and securing funding for construction of the largest greenhouse in South America. 

Through the middle of 2023, MD has published 54 peer-reviewed journal articles, 18 book chapters, 8 authored books, 2 edited books and 7 published scientific reports plus 88 extinction risk assessments for plants. He has also delivered 200 presentations at conferences and 41 invited talks at university seminars and special events. 

As a lecturer and teacher, MD has supervised 16 postgraduate students from various universities.  

No wonder that MD was targeted by a famous botanical garden in the U.S. when it was searching to replace its retiring, longtime leader. 

JOB CHANGING CONSIDERATIONS

When contacted by the New York Botanical Garden about becoming their Chief Scientist, MD had to consider all the aspects of relocating to a different job, though still within his same career path including: Was he satisfied that sufficient scientific progress had been made at his current job (Kew) so he wouldn’t be abandoning it prematurely? Would moving to an entirely new country be too much of a mental ordeal? Would he be truly welcomed or be viewed forever as an outsider with little influence over science programs in which he was passionately interested? Was the financial part of the job offer sufficient for his needs, both present and future? Giving all these issues thorough consideration, MD decided that all his answers pointed him toward accepting the offer by the New York City based botanical garden. 

QUICK INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN

Botanical gardens tend to reflect their countries’ histories of empire or influence. Visitors to the New York Botanical Garden – seeking solace amid its native conifers or rows of roses – tend not to realize that since its inception in 1891, it has been home to a research program focused heavily on the American tropics. Although many of its staff botanists, graduate students and visiting scholars have origins in Latin America and the Caribbean, MD’s appointment as Chief Scientist for the New York Botanical Garden represents the first time that its science leader hails from the same region as so much of its collections. 

Nearly eight million specimens are stored in the herbarium, among them the leaves of frailejones that MD collected as a young researcher. About 40,000 different botanical specimens arrive every year from scientists in the field or from other institutions. The connection between the botanical garden as a public attraction and a research facility is its living collection, whose plants are routinely sampled to help answer questions in plant genetics, structure, and evolution. 

While in Bogota, MD once discovered a small population of a local sunflower species, long thought to be extinct, growing in a suburban wetland. His staff propagated the flowers and promoted them as ornamental plants. And now, he said, they can be seen all over the city.

Lately a team in the Bronx, including an expert in New York flora, have been investigating the hop sedge, a plant that once grew prolifically on the banks of the Bronx River. It’s a species that can stabilize waterfronts and serve as a buffer against increasingly frequent floods. “This is not one of those species that Home Depot is going to provide to the city, because they have no idea that it exists,” said MD. “Who has the knowledge? We do.”

As MD gets to know the botanical garden’s collections and talent, he keeps envisioning ways that both could be brought to bear on more human problems, like food security, air quality and human health. He feels at home in an institution whose daily research labors require him to be in constant contact with Latin America, as well as in this part of the Bronx, where Spanish is spoken on every block. 

“Cultural diversity is becoming a key aspect of American culture,” says MD. “This is an institution fully committed to that. But having a Colombia chief science officer is a great opportunity to open the doors even wider, to have more interaction.”

Says MD, “There’s a big range of work going on here, from understanding fruit and seed evolution and adaptation of plants to marginal habitats, to the potential consequences of climate change, all the way to diversification in the neotropics.”

He continued: “Science (exists) to investigate, to understand nature, but also to help us protect the planet and improve our quality of life. What I need to do now is figure out how this institution can respond better to those challenges.” 

PEOPLE IN ANY CAREER (SHOULD) HAVE GOALS FOR CONTINUING THEIR PROFESSIONAL PROGRESS

Says MD, “This is the time for institutions like the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) to start providing solutions to the world. We just cannot keep doing the science as we are used to doing.”

MD aims to expand the science program into new areas, pointing to the garden’s recent hiring of a botanist who will work on “functional traits of plants that allow us to investigate, for instance, carbon sequestration and how we can use plants to fight against climate change.”

Another key hire is the garden’s first vice president for urban conservation strategy. 

MD is proud that the NYBG is leading several dozen field projects worldwide and would like to see more drones and artificial intelligence employed in that fieldwork. He notes that there are devices being developed that will allow someone to sample a piece of a plant and get a polymerase chain reaction on the spot, adding that he dreamed of a device that could also recognize the genetic sequences of species and read out their names. 

He asked (rhetorically), “How much more ground could be covered, how many species logged, how much time saved?” Botanists like him have always been few. As MD noted, “You can’t always have the world expert on every plant family along with you.”

MD is now working on a book about frailejones; he is now the world’s living authority. His work, once focused on their diversity and geography, has lately come to focus more on their function – how they store water in their crowns and how their presence or absence affects the hydrology of paramo ecosystems, which are threatened by warning climates and agriculture. 

CAREER SATISFACTION

MD has received 11 honors and awards, including a summa cum laude Science thesis, the best Bachelor of Science student, the best postdoctoral student, the best paper at the Virgin Islands Colombian Botany Meetings and the best doctoral paper on systematics at the 2012 Botanical Society of American meetings. 

He has also published a world checklist of useful plants – a virtually boundless, searchable database of species that supply food, medicine, fiber, and fuel and help mitigate the effects of climate change. 

MD’s research projects have been funded by well-known organizations, including the Natural Environment Research Counsel, National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. 

In recent years, MD took it upon himself to make one in every 10 Columbians aware of an ambitious project to identify the country’s fungi species and find different and novel uses for them. He created channels on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube and got 50 related articles published in news outlets. 

He doesn’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that the average American might soon know more about the science happening at the New York Botanical Garden. In two or three years, “you’ll be getting your coffee and hear on NPR (National Public Radio) that ‘scientists at NYBG have made a big discovery!” 

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This career story is based on multiple sources including a news article written by Jennie Erin Smith, published by The New York Times on August 1, 2023, plus internet research, including Wikipedia.