UBC Botanical Garden both provides research opportunities for students and researchers and conducts research.

Research Opportunities

Interested researchers and students are invited to contact us to determine if UBC Botanical Garden has the resources and/or collections to support your individual research interests. In addition to its significant plant collections, UBC Botanical Garden has expert horticultural and botanical staff, plant-growing facilities (including a nursery), and a mission to promote plant research.

Examples of Research Projects Conducted by UBC Botanical Garden

Joint collection forays

UBC Botanical Garden, in partnership with the UBC Herbarium, has established an annual plant collection foray within British Columbia. For the Botanical Garden, these forays in part serve the purpose of helping to renew the native plant collections within its British Columbia Rainforest Garden as well as develop the collections in the Garry Oak Meadow and Woodland Garden and the eventual Pacific Slope Garden. These forays also help to provide field experience and training to students and expand the documented knowledge of the British Columbia flora.

For 2011, the joint collection foray visited sites near the communities of Yale, Lytton, Spences Bridge and Ashcroft, along southern British Columbia’s Fraser and Thompson River corridors.

Involvement with Canadensys and other research programs

UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research is an institutional partner in the Canada-wide Canadensys project. Through funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation for Canadensys, UBC Botanical Garden has been able to significantly improve the identification, documentation, and herbarium specimen deposits of its plant collections. In turn, this has allowed UBC Botanical Garden to make plant tissue and DNA sequence data available to the International Barcode of Life and OneKP projects.

Magnolia phenology project

UBC Friends of the Garden, in coordination with UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research staff members, have developed a long-term monitoring project of Magnolia phenology in UBC Botanical Garden's collections. Phenology, the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena in relation to climate, is a mechanism by which long-term changes in climate can be identified. The Magnolia phenology project has been ongoing for over twenty years.