Notes from Nature - Expedition Arctic Botany

The Botany Team

The National Herbarium of Canada team is comprised of many researchers, collections specialists and volunteers. Our work would not happen without the collaborative efforts of all our team members.

Expedition Arctic Botany Team

Our expedition is spearheaded by this plucky group of staff members:

Jennifer Doubt

First and foremost, Jennifer Doubt is the Curator of the National Herbarium of Canada here at the Canadian Museum of Nature. That means she works to safeguard and document over one million specimens of Canadian wild plants, and ensures that Canadian and international researchers, educators and enthusiasts can access and learn from the specimens. Jennifer is an expert on Canadian mosses and their plant relatives. Mosses blanket much of Canada—especially in the Arctic and boreal regions—and make life possible for thousands of animal and plant species by providing essential food and habitat. Jennifer documents Canada's mosses through her research and collaborations, to help understand and protect this important part of Canadian biodiversity.

Kim Madge

	Kim Madge is the technical assistant in the botany department at the Canadian Museum of Nature specializing in digitization and citizen science. Kim started in the Botany department as an intern in 2010 and has been working on various collections tasks since then with a brief stint in Calgary AB.

Paul Sokoloff

As a senior research assistant in the botany department at the Canadian Museum of Nature, and a member of the Arctic Flora of Canada and Alaska project, Paul Sokoloff's work boils down to cataloguing plant biodiversity in the Arctic and beyond. On any given day, he may be in a faraway place doing field work, in the museum's herbarium studying plant specimens or in the lab analyzing DNA of Arctic plants. In the quest for science, he's had his clothes stolen in southern Labrador, flipped over a canoe full of samples in New Brunswick's Jacquet River, and come face-to-face with a curious wolf on Ellesmere Island. Paul first came to the museum as a master's student in the botany division. Two days after submitting his thesis, he was on a plane bound for Victoria Island in the Western Canadian Arctic as a museum field assistant, and he hasn't looked back since. Since then, Paul has embarked on nine Arctic expeditions with the museum and worked on various projects and papers cataloging the flora diversity of this rapidly changing ecosystem.

Evan Seed

Evan Seed is a technical assistant in the botany department at the Canadian Museum of Nature working on image and data processing tools for the Arctic Digitization Project. He is also the one who wrangles the data created by citizen scientists. Evan is an expert in the creation, analysis and curation of environmental data and is particularly interested in all things geospatial as a way of understanding the natural world.