About me
I'm a scientist at the Missouri Botanical Garden, where I lead a division devoted to understanding the ways that plants support people, and the reciprocal ways by which people can protect plants.
Programs span from field inventory and species discovery to community-driven conservation with significant programs across Africa and Madagascar, ethnobotany at the William L. Brown Center with emphasis on plants for food and medicine, and interdisciplinary engagement through exhibitions and programs at the Garden’s Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum.
My own research is on plant ecology and adaptive knowledge that people build. Particular areas of interest are climate change impacts on mountainous environments, leveraging biodiversity collections to understand processes across space and time, and understanding how local knowledge of edible plants may affect food security.
Some recent and prior publications:
Repositories of biocultural diversity: Toward best practices for empowering ethnobotany in digital herbaria (Hart et al. in Plants People Planet 2026)
The human fingerprint of medicinal plant diversity (Shrestha et al. in Current Biology 2025).
A Swirling Offering: Climate Change Impacts on Incense and Other Useful Alpine Plants of Bhutan (Gyeltshen et al. in Ethnobotany and Economic Botany 2025).
Wild foods are positively associated with diet diversity and child growth in a protected forest area of Madagascar (Iannotti et al. Current Developments in Nutrition 2024)
A framework for monitoring biodiversity in protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (Dalton et al. IUCN 2024)
Sustainable harvest of a threatened medicinal herb (Poudeyal et al. Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics 2024)
