Negaunee Institute for Plant Conservation Science & Action

A rusty patched bumble bee with yellow, black, and brown colors on the pink flower of a Kankakee mallow.

That thing where the endangered bee visits the endangered plant.

Pictured: A federally endangered rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis) visiting an Illinois endangered Kankakee mallow (Iliamna remota) at Chicago Botanic Garden.

📷: @beesearcher.bsky.social

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Plant Patterns: Where Beauty Meets Function Ever been captivated by the spiral of a sunflower or the one-of-a-kind stripes on a zebra? Our brains are natural pattern detectors, wired by evolution to appreciate structure in chaos. Decoding patterns helps us navigate the world—it’s how we recognize faces, understand language, and learn new skills.For scientists, patterns are also clues that something deeper is at work.

🌿 From the efficient growth of Fibonacci‑twisted scaly tree ferns to bee‑attracting petal spots and landing pads of butterfly orchids, many patterns that seem random actually have evolved for clear biological purposes.

🐝Read our blog post to learn more at https://bit.ly/PatternsinPlants.

🌸🌀 Discover how the spirals, stripes, and spots in plants reveal nature’s clever balance of beauty and biology.

Through it all, Jackie also discovered a love for teaching and is joining Williams College as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology. Huge congrats, Jackie!

Her findings show that body size variation can influence survival, reproduction and climate sensitivity. This could help us predict how pollinators will respond to a warming world. Her fieldwork wasn’t without adventure: it included being treed by a moose, two broken arms and hiking to parody songs.

She captured and measured over 2,000 bees, developed new methods to track changes in trait distributions, and explored how size affects bee fitness and resilience under climate change.

Have you ever noticed that even bees of the same species can vary a lot in size? Jackie spent five field seasons at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab uncovering what that means for bumble bee ecology and evolution.

🐝 Congratulations to Dr. Jackie Fitzgerald, who recently defended her PhD: “Dimensions of Difference: Multi-Scale Consequences of Trait Variation in Bumble Bees” under the guidance of Dr. Paul CaraDonna!

Come explore this sedge sanctuary, located just north of the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Plant Conservation Science Center at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

📸 by Liz Anna Kozik and Libby Shafer

#SedgeLawn #Sedges #RethinkingLawns

Native sedges provide many ecological benefits compared to turfgrass: they support specialist insects that only eat or lay eggs on those particular species, provide habitat, stabilize soil, reduce stormwater runoff, sequester carbon, and enhance nutrient cycling.

Sedge Way serves as both a demonstration garden and research site. Although sedges have great potential as lawn alternatives, many native sedges aren’t yet commercially available. By utilizing the seed bank, the team was able to grow wild species that are rarely found in plant nurseries today.

Our production team grew 13 species of native sedges from seed locally collected (with permission) around Chicagoland. Once the plants were big enough to survive on their own, they were installed by Garden scientists and students Becky Barak, Jeremie Fant, Liz Anna Kozik, Liz Vogel and Libby Shafer.

Welcome to Sedge Way—a section of turfgrass transformed into a thriving native sedge habitat at the Chicago Botanic Garden!

a rusty-patch bumblebee hanging off of a light purple-pink monarda. the rusty patch is a lovely terra cotta shining in the setting sun

a rusty-patch bumblebee hanging off of a light purple-pink monarda. the rusty patch is a lovely terra cotta shining in the setting sun

timeline cleanse, look at this beautiful, federally-endangered angel from some fresh angles

🌿 We’re always glad to get our hands dirty with @urbanrivers.bsky.social ! Our Stewardship and Ecology of Natural Areas technicians removed weeds, planted native species, and inventoried wildlife at the Wild Mile’s floating gardens. Thanks to Urban Rivers for the continued partnership!

Please admire from afar and keep at least 100 yards away from the nest to protect the birds and their habitat. Visit bit.ly/OspreyStoryMap to learn more about the osprey conservation efforts. 

📸 by Anna Messina
#Osprey #BirdConservation #UrbanWildlife

Last year, this particular osprey couple moved into the Chicago Botanic Garden's platform—installed and monitored in partnership with FPDCC and Friends of the Chicago River—and now, they’re raising their first chick!

To support the ospreys, FPDCC maintains 20 nesting platforms. Each 50-foot structure is designed to give ospreys a safe alternative to nesting in trees, where they often face predators and storm damage. Many osprey pairs return to the same platform every year, raising one to four chicks per season.

FPDCC’s osprey propagation program is the most successful urban osprey program in North America, helping the species recover after dramatic population declines caused in part by DDT insecticide use from the 1950s to 1970s.

Banding helps biologists monitor bird health, track migration, and detect ecosystem changes. FPDCC bands about 400 birds each year—from sparrows to sandhill cranes! For ospreys, there’s a brief window of around 15 days after hatching when it’s safest to band the chicks.

🐣 Say hi to the newest osprey chick at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Nested along the East Service Road, this little one was safely banded yesterday by Senior Wildlife Biologist Chris Anchor and the Forest Preserve District of Cook County team as part of their long-running osprey conservation program.

They’ll be using heart rate variability measurements and survey responses to explore how spending time in prairie restorations in Chicago parks and Dixon Prairie at the Chicago Botanic Garden can help lower people's stress levels and contribute to our health.

Want to spend time outside and help scientists learn how habitat restorations in public parks make us healthier? Email our Associate Conservation Genomics Scientist, Dr. Suzy Strickler, and graduate student, Isaac Ferber, at OutdoorWellbeing@Northwestern.edu to participate in a new research study.

During his retirement, Dave is looking forward to branching out in illustration work, trying out new styles and media, gardening (especially with native plants in his backyard prairie), kayaking, and traveling. Dave is also excited to spend time with family, including his granddaughter in Colorado.

We will miss Dave’s kind nature, botany puns, cherry pie, and his willingness to always help. Dave’s deep knowledge about plants and plant identification has helped countless colleagues and students over the years. Dave has also worked with many volunteers in the seed bank.

Dave created many illustrations for garden publications, manuscripts, and books. He also taught dozens of classes at the garden, including botany, plant identification and botanical illustration, as well as classes in the Naturalist Certificate Program.

🌾 Dave joined us in 1980 as an ecologist. In 2007, he became the Seed Conservation Specialist. He was instrumental in planning, creating, interpreting, and studying the Dixon Prairie. His favorite part has been visiting incredible nature preserves to collect seed for conservation in our seed bank.

🎉 Please join us in sending a big thank you and congratulations to Dave Sollenberger, Manager of the Dixon National Tallgrass Prairie Seedbank, on his retirement from the Chicago Botanic Gaden.

🎨 Dave Sollenberger
#Congrats #HappyRetirement

There’s a Shortage of Native Seeds, So Cook County Preserves Is Growing Its Own Supply Cook County Forest Preserves is on a mission to restore 30,000 acres of habitat to high-quality condition by the year 2030. There’s just one tiny little problem: a lack of native seed.

🌳🧪 Restoring 30,000 acres of land takes a lot of native seed. We’re helping the Forest Preserves of Cook County meet this ambitious goal through the Seed Amplification Program, so that FPCC can grow more seed from more species—and restore diverse, healthy habitats.