Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery is one of several publicly accessible green spaces along Long Island’s Harbor Hill moraine. The cemetery’s 478 glacially-deposited acres are filled with trees, lawns, gardens—and wilder patches—that attract arthropods and the birds that depend upon them. In Autumn and Winter, the cemetery’s diverse habitats provide a rich opportunity for observing the smallest plants—the bryophytes—as well as their frequent neighbors, the lichens. Amongst these miniature canopies live tiny animals that need their wee photosynthetic neighbors every bit as much as their larger relatives need the trees—and other angiosperm and gymnosperm plants—that populate the cemetery.
Please join us for a 2-3 hour walk during which we will observe several different habitats—including diverse types of grave markers—in and on which these lichen and bryophyte flora thrive. Wear sturdy walking shoes and be prepared for hilly terrain. If you have them, bring binoculars and a hand lens. We will have extra hand lenses for you to borrow.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/…/lichens-and-bryophytes-of…
Directions:
Meeting at 12:00pm just inside the Gothic gate at the cemetery’s main entrance, at the intersection of 5th Avenue & 25th St., Brooklyn, NY.
Public transportation, from NYC, by the subway, take the R train and exit at 25th Street, walk one block East on 25th St (Brooklyn).
Trip Leader: Molly Nash Rouzie (blanketofpeas@gmail.com) is an NYC-based naturalist who has spent countless hours botanizing at the cemetery and a director of the Torrey Botanical Society. Jordan Hoffman (hoffmaj@newschool.edu) began studying lichens in 2016 during the start of his PhD and is now an assistant professor of biology at Eugene Lang College at The New School.
