NACPEC Papers Project

In this project, the student will be working with the archives for the North America-China Plant Exploration Consortium (NACPEC). NACPEC is an important cooperative organization for US, Canadian, and Chinese botanical gardens, arboreta, and biological/ecological institutions, and we are very honored to be their archival repository.

The collection is large and has had a basic reorganization, however there is still weeding, organization, description, rewriting the finding aid, and probably some digitization of materials that needs to be done to consider this collection 'processed'. When the finding aid is complete, we will post a link to it on the NACPEC archives page (https://arboretum.harvard.edu/plants/plant-exploration/nacpec-expeditions/) on the AA website.

As an addition to this project, the intern will write an account of a NACPEC expedition for the Arboretum website to be included in our Expeditions Unveiled page. This feature may be found about ½ way down this page: https://arboretum.harvard.edu/plants/plant-exploration/ and a good example of the expedition pages is this one for the NACPEC expedition in search of the paperbark maple (Acer griseum) in 2015: https://arboretum.harvard.edu/expeditions/north-america-china-plant-exploration-consortium-nacpec-expedition-to-collect-acer-griseum/. The trip the student will be writing about is the 2016 trip to the Huanglong Nature Preserve in Songpan County, Sichuan. There is a detailed trip report for this expedition that can be used for reference.