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Researchers from the (1) New York Botanical Garden are about to lead a global effort to capture DNA from thousands of tree species from around the world.
The Bronx garden is hosting a meeting last week where participants from various countries will lay the groundwork for how the two-year undertaking to catalog some of the Earth's vast biodiversity will proceed.
The project is known as TreeBOL, or tree barcode of life.
A section of the DNA would be used as a barcode, similar to the way a product at the grocery store is scanned to bring up its price. But with plants and animals, the scanners look at the specific order of the four basic building blocks of DNA to identify the species.
The resulting database will help identify many of the world's existing plant species, where they are located and whether they are endangered. The results are crucial for conservation and protecting the environment as population and development increases, said Damon Little, assistant curator of bioinformatics at the Botanical Garden and coordinator of the project.
"If you don't know what you're potentially destroying, how can you know if it's important or not?" he said. "We know so little about the natural world, when it comes down to it, even though we've been working on it for hundreds of years."
The undertaking is massive. Trees make up 25 percent of all plants, and little estimates there could be as many as 100,000 species. The participants hail from countries such as South Africa, India, and, of course, the United States.
The garden received a grant of nearly $600,000 (euro386,000) to coordinate the project. While the genetic database won't be completed for two years, Little anticipates making headway in some specific areas — such as the flora of the Northeastern U.S. and parts of Malaysia, India and South Africa, as well as endangered tree species — in the meantime.
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