About Me
I use field, lab, and museum-based scientific methods combined with historical research to study how humans have unintentionally shaped patterns in botanical biodiversity through time and space. Through this research, I hope to better understand the complex and evolving relationship between plants and people and increase the knowledge of--and appreciation for--botanical biodiversity in everyday life. I am particularly interested in the establishment and spread of historical non-natives and the impacts that humans have had and continue to have on plant distributions.
I began my graduate studies with Lena Struwe at Rutgers University and am currently completing my PhD in Organismic & Evolutionary Biology at the Harvard University Herbaria with Charles Davis as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow. I have worked extensively with the curation of herbarium collections and in urban forestry where I developed guidelines for municipal tree inventories and assessed the accuracy of photo-based plant identification apps on tree species common to the Northeastern US. |
Collecting an herbarium specimen of an early-emerging weed
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Profiles & Contact Information:
ryanschmidt1399<at>gmail.com |
ryanschmidt1399 |
ORCiD 0000-0002-4907-2270 |