Nature Lab Local Biodiversity

The Edna Lawrence Nature Lab houses a wide array of plant, animal, and mineral specimens and other natural curios from around the world. Our collections serve as models and muses to inspire art and design and better acquaint RISD students with the great diversity of forms, functions, patterns, and textures of the natural world.

Although our specimens and imaging technologies at the Nature Lab allow students to closely inspect, investigate, and interpret nature, we'd like to remind everyone in the RISD community that even the streets and parks of College Hill in Providence are teeming with life year round. Locations like the Regenerative Earth Collective Garden ("The Plot"), Mary E. Sharpe Memorial Park, First Baptist Church garden, and Shakespeare's Head Garden (Prov. Preservation Society) provide refuge and resources for greater biodiversity than the manicured lawns and aesthetic gardens along our streets.

Many of our urban neighbors are obvious and familiar, like the birds and trees we pass daily, while others, like insects and small flowers, are minute, infrequent or ephemeral. And yet, all of these species become more intriguing and surprising when observed more closely and intentionally.

We hope this project may help to document the various biota that cohabit the RISD campus and College Hill area of Providence and lead to further exploration of their biology and ecology. iNaturalist can serve as a tool to introduce us to the specific plants, animals, fungi, etc. that we encounter and also keeps an ever-growing reference library of our local biota. For a closer look at some of these species and/or their relatives, visit the Nature Lab :) less ↑