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exploreneoh · 3 years

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An End to the American Beech?

Last week, in the cool of the July morning, I went for a walk along the Plateau Trail on the western slope of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Located a few miles southwest of Peninsula, the Plateau Trail is an easy 4.4-mile loop trail featuring young and older-aged hardwood forest. Along the way, however, I noticed that the leaves of some juvenile beech trees looked unusual. They were dry and crackly, like a brown dehydrated fallen leaf in November, but still green and connected to the tree. I did some research, and it seems that these are among countless other Northeast Ohio beech trees suffering from Beech Leaf Disease.

According to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Beech Leaf Disease (BLD) was first discovered in Lake County, OH in 2012, affecting primarily American beech (Fagus grandifolia) and European beech trees (Fagus sylvatica). Since then, BLD has been documented throughout Northeast Ohio and in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Ontario. The ODNR describes, “dark banding on leaves, leaf disfigurement, and branch dieback,” as typical BLD symptoms, “linked to the presence of nematodes (microscopic worms) in the leaves and buds.” BLD has greatly weakened the beech understory and has led to, “extensive mortality” of young beech trees. Many details pertaining to the origin and spread of BLD are still unknown.

Upon discovery, Lake Metroparks Naturalist John Pogacnik contacted the U.S. Forestry Services and botanists at the Ohio State University and others in Europe and Asia regarding BLD. No one else had ever heard of such a disease. Meanwhile, BLD was spreading from just 510ha of Lake County forest in 2013 to 2,525ha in 2016. Similar growth patterns are visible throughout other affected areas. BLD, however, is not the only disease affecting beech trees. Beech bark disease (BBD), spread by the scale insect (Cryptococcus fagisuga), is a lethal disease that, “precedes the attack of the BBD bark fungi” (Ewing, Hausman, Pogacnik, Slot, Bonello, 2019). Additionally, the invasive beech leaf-mining weevil (Orchestes fagi) has been destroying American beech trees in Nova Scotia with greater intensity since 2012. Scientists predict that, through human-assisted and natural movement patterns, O. fagi will spread throughout the existing range of the American beech, causing irreparable damage to the species and North American forests.

Beech-maple forests are an extremely important ecosystem throughout eastern North America. Beech trees, which hold their leaves all winter long, are critical for birds and mammals that rely on them for food and shelter. The migratory red bat (Lasiurus borealis) hides among the beech leaves when it returns to Ohio in early spring. Beechnuts are an integral element in the diets of turkeys, jays, squirrels, foxes, and black bears. Furthermore, the reduction of the beech tree canopy and understory affects the light environment in forests which may greatly alter the entire eastern hardwood ecosystem. The loss of American beech trees will also be expensive to humans, leading to over $225 million lost in terms of the environmental benefits otherwise provided by existing beech trees. Although scientists are not expecting the total extinction of the American beech, its functionality as a species in eastern forests will likely wane.

In the wake of the loss of American chestnut trees (Castenea dentata) eradicated by the chestnut blight of the early 1900s, eastern forests evolved to the now dominant beech-maple ecosystem. Although many species which depended upon chestnut trees did not survive, forest ecosystems adapted just like they have for millennia. If North America does witness the end of the era of the American beech, a new ecosystem will eventually form, and forest species will largely adapt to the new forest composition. The ever changing eastern hardwood forest will persevere as always and, in the meantime, scientists will continue researching ways to stop the spread and defend against BLD and other diseases affecting American beech trees. Next time you’re hiking in the forest and notice a healthy American beech tree, savor the sight and appreciate the beech-maple forest through which you’re likely traversing. You are experiencing a constantly changing environment that never stagnates, one who's days might be numbered.

Image Descriptions: All images taken along the Plateau Trail, Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Peninsula, OH.

Top left: The Plateau Trail winding through the Northeast Ohio hardwood forest

Top middle: American beech trees looking up

Top right: American beech trees looking up

Bottom left: Individual American beech with apparent effects of BLD. Dry ribbed leaves

Bottom right: Closer analysis of aforementioned individual with apparent effects of BLD

Ewing, C. J., Housman, C. E., Pogacnik, J., Slot, J., & Bonello, P. (2018). Beech Leaf Disease: An Emerging Forest Epidemic. ms, Columbus, OH. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1111/efp.12488.

Martin, D. K., & Volk, D. (2021, January). Beech Leaf Disease. Pest Alert. https://ohiodnr.gov/wps/wcm/connect/gov/1b6ef179-92be-49d6-ab38-74ecda2ed5c5/BeechLeafDisease-USDA-FS-PestAlert-2021.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CONVERT_TO=url&CACHEID=ROOTWORKSPACE.Z18_M1HGGIK0N0JO00QO9DDDDM3000-1b6ef179-92be-49d6-ab38-74ecda2ed5c5-nEQ-fsc.

McCarty, J. F. (2017, December 10). Beech Leaf Disease Discovered in Lake County, Spreading Throughout NE Ohio, PA, NY, Ontario: (photos, video). The Plain Dealer. https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/12/beech_leaf_disease_discovered.html.

Stansberry, M. (2018, October 26). A Tree Hugger's Guide to the Forest Dynamics of Northeast Ohio. Belt Magazine. https://beltmag.com/a-tree-huggers-guide-to-the-forest-dynamics-of-northeast-ohio/?fbclid=IwAR1s5hrDX732x6ucIN_HQfOJbNaQW-HClpFo-fC9h70eOF3xla5FHaEkAco.

Sweeney JD, Hughes C, Zhang H, Hillier NK, Morrison A and Johns R (2020) Impact of the Invasive Beech Leaf-Mining Weevil, Orchestes fagi, on American Beech in Nova Scotia, Canada. Front. For. Glob. Change 3:46. doi: 10.3389/ffgc.2020.00046

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uxannie · 4 years

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Paradigm shift: a plant’s perspective

Today we presented our concept design so far to the class: a game of plant life based on Monopoly, whose aim was to transform peoples’ attitudes and values about plants in an effort to prolong the plants’ lifecycles.

Lara wisely and critically reviewed our proposal, and raised several issues that questioned our underlying paradigm entirely. First, we claimed to be designing for plants, but were effectively designing for people. Furthermore, the medium of a game risks potentially detracting from the seriousness of the issues at hand, while the specific format of Monopoly reinforces an existing societal paradigm of commodifying plants for human consumption.

Lara also raised the issue of our temporal relationship with plant life, which got me thinking. On the one hand, for annual plants, their lives might only be a season (or in some cases, even days?), whereas for many plants such as most trees, their life expectancy far exceeds humans, while their rates of movement and growth unfold so slowly that these processes are imperceptible to our naked human eyes.

Finally, Lara and Alex both raised the issue of plant agency. When designing for, with, or around plant life, it is important to consider the moral imperative to understand the world from plants’ perspectives (or, given the impossibility of this task, to at least make our best attempts at doing so).

These issues brought me back to three resources, which I had previously come across but reflect upon now in a different light. These are outlined below:

1) The Botany of Desire, book by Michael Pollan & PBS film

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Michael Pollan’s book the Botany of Desire offers a hypothesis that most definitely raises the issue of plant agency-- but this time with respect to the way that plants evolve. Or, according to Pollan, the way plants use humans to further their own evolution.

Pollan delves into the evolutionary stories of four plants highly manipulated by humans: tulips, potatoes, apples, and cannabis. The author posits that each of these plants evolved a quality attractive to humans’ desires, such that we would use our ingenuity and technologies to exponentially speed up their evolution. According to this hypothesis, each of these plants have effectively maniupulated us: tulips through their beauty, apples through their sweetness, potatoes through control and cannabis through intoxication.

The book and film ask us to take a macro view into the notion of plant agency and to question our paradigms about power dynamics between humans and plants, asking us to consider: who is manipulating and using whom?

2) What Plants Talk About, PBS Nature

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This television documentary episode discusses the ways that plants communicate amongst themselves and other species. Making use of the aforementioned time-lapse video method, the scientists responsible for the content of this film have discerned very interesting biological information about plants. Namely: they do move. Moreover, they can smell. And they can make smells to communicate with one another.

One of the main methods of plant communication introduced by this film is the concept of pheromones. Narrators inform us that the smell of cut grass loved by so many humans is in fact ‘a chemical scream.’ Even more interesting is the information that parasitic Daughter Vines sniff out their favourite host (tomato plants) and grow towards them.

Overall, the film supports the hypothesis that plants are sentient and communicate with one another, and through various technologies we humans may be able to hack into their communication channels to understand what they are saying.

3) The Overstory by Richard Powers

Richard Powers’ collection of short stories called The Overstory contains a narrative about a first-generation American immigrant who brings a handful of chestnuts across the country with him and plants them on his Iowa farmstead. Four of the original five chestnut trees die throughout different tribulations in their first years of life, and the farmer decides to start documenting the sole survivor by climbing onto the roof of his house and photographing the tree on the first day of every month.

When the farmer dies, his son continues his father’s tradition. This carries on for several generations, to the point that the act of flipping through the fat collection of printed photographs unfurls a visualization of the life of the tree through seasons of growth and decay over decades. Lacking captions or any sort of explanation from their initiating forefather, the photographers—and in turn, the readers—are left to ponder the meanings of this heirloom ritual.

Alongside the subjects of this story, we wonder about the significance of these farmers’ regular photographic practice, which transforms through the generations yet remains opaque even to its practitioners. We wonder about the meanings of the photographs as surviving artefacts which outlive their creators, carrying unspoken stories heavier than the fragile structures of language might be able to bear.

And so we wonder: what can visualisations communicate that cannot be contained in words? Of course, one might stop with the cliche adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,’ or perhaps take it a step further by citing time-lapse videos which illustrate the growth of plants by radically speeding up the progression of frames. In fact, my generation is so habituated to these time-lapse videos that the concept of ‘plant time’ may seem familiar, even boring to them. However, whilst time-lapse videos may convey relevant biological information, we might consider what might be lost by synthetically altering the speed of plants’ processes to fit our own temporal lens?

How might still, printed photographs communicate plant time differently than time-lapse videos? On the one hand, flipping through the photographs reveals the same sort of time-lapse peek into plant time by speeding up years of growth into a few brief seconds of human time. But on the other hand, I am enchanted by photographs as artefacts themselves, made of paper which came from trees, inhabiting an organic material form susceptible to decay, yet with a longevity that far exceeds our own.

Through and through the ponderings on the farmers’ medium and message, and yet a deeper mystery pervades. We might easily pontificate about our human means of communication and understanding-- and yet, still we wonder. We wonder about the tree. Who is this chestnut tree? This seemingly sentient giant who survives and silently oversees it all?

The question of the tree’s meaning may never be answered, but is a fount for perhaps neverending questioning and creative attempts at dancing around an answer...

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philsom-blog · 5 years

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Could GMO’s be our most powerful weapon to save our biosphere? This video states that GMO plants that are destined to be eaten are tested by multiple agancies for over 30 years with 1000nds of studies and are as safe as eating non GMO plants. BT crops are plants that have been engineerd with the gene of the bt bacterium, they are now equiped with a poison that is harmfull for certain insects, but not human beings. Plants that are designed to resist pesticides we spray on them are worse. (over 90% of crops in the USA are resistant to herbicides). Farmers come to rely on this method only of managing crops, more sustainable environmental friendly methods are therefor ignored. In bangladesh before 2013 lots of farmers had health issues because of the ammount of pesticides they had to use. Then the GM eggplant was introduced, targeting digestive tracks of insects and killing them. The use of pesticides could be reduced with 80%. Also fruits like papayas have been safed by gmo, making them resistant to a certain virus.

Is it possible to create plants that are more healthy for us and even survive climate change? Can we make plants that take in a crazy ammount of CO2 to revearse climate change? (like the american chestnut tree).

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 5 years

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OF THE MOSAIC, mostly the eyes remain, framed by locks of chestnut hair. On one ear, a hoop gold earring; on the head, a green-gray scarf. There is a flush of red where the hair touches the cheek, deep color rising slowly to the cheekbones. She looks startled; the silent shock of a deer locked in place. Her look turns inward, fear sliding to thoughtful resignation and perhaps fatigue. “She,” I say, though the museum sign explains that there is still discussion about the mosaic’s gender. Some think this is the face of Alexander the Great; others, the earth goddess Gaia.

Many diminutive names were given her at the time of her discovery — “The Zeugma Girl,” “Our Girl” — even though these are doubtless the eyes of an adult. The name that stuck was “Gypsy Girl” (Çingene Kızı), and whatever debate there was about the face’s gender, age, or origin was mostly forgotten with this new mythology. In the 18 years since she has been displayed in Gaziantep’s Zeugma Mosaic Museum, close to Turkey’s Syrian border, the “Gypsy Girl” has become a symbol of the city and of Turkey’s classical heritage. Her eyes are reproduced on countless posters and souvenirs, looking on through millennia.

The Gypsy Girl mosaic was discovered beneath a fallen column in 1998 during rescue excavations of the second-century Roman settlement, Zeugma, on the banks of the Euphrates River, when the site was about to be flooded with the construction of the Birecik Dam in southeastern Turkey. The mosaic was one of many covering the floor of a Roman villa’s triclinium, the chamber reserved for hosting, with its reclining chairs arranged around the dinner table, lavishly decorated with motifs of flora and fauna and themes of entertainment. The colors of the mosaics’ glass and rock echo the landscape of the Euphrates — the muted yellows and greens; silty hills of oak and ash spreading around the shimmering blues. At the time of the excavations, most of the floor mosaics had disappeared. The villa was looted by black market smugglers in the early 1960s, like many other ancient sites in Turkey. Individual pictures were broken up with pickaxes and hammers, shattering the colorful geometric decorations surrounding them. By chance, the looters had overlooked the Gypsy Girl, hidden beneath a column.

Soon thereafter, 12 of the stolen mosaics resurfaced in New York at the Peter Marks Works of Art Gallery. Among them were depictions of birds, satyrs, theater masks, and the face of a woman with a sideways glance, much like the Gypsy Girl. In 1965, Marks sold the Zeugma mosaics to Bowling Green State University in Ohio for $35,000, with scanty paperwork showing the origin of the pieces as the city of Antioch, a short distance from Zeugma. He also provided pencil sketches showing how the mosaics would have looked in their original place.

Antioch, modern-day Antakya, had been excavated extensively in the 1930s by a group of archeologists headed by Princeton University, with hopes of discovering the city’s ancient Christian sites. The expedition uncovered 300 Roman mosaic floors, 40 of which were taken to the United States alongside thousands of coins and smaller artifacts, which were distributed among universities, galleries, and museums. When Antioch became part of the Turkish Republic in 1939, with strict prohibitions against exporting antiquities, the mission was hastily wrapped up and the last excavated artifacts shipped to New Jersey.

Black-and-white photographs from the Antioch excavation show villagers working deep in the trenches, hauling colossal stones, cleaning baskets of daily finds. In one photograph, two young men, wearing fezes, shalvars, and white cotton shorts, chip away at a mosaic of fish. In another, an old man with a long beard and turban sits hugging his knees in the shade of an olive tree. Behind him is the giant floor mosaic of a striding lion amid a sea of flowers. The camera’s focus is on the art, lavish, exquisite, while the modest people surrounding it appear small, even insignificant.

In 2011, 47 years after their purchase, the Zeugma mosaics were cleaned, restored, and installed under protective glass on the floor of the new Wolfe Center for the Arts at Bowling Green State University. On the occasion of the mosaics’ inauguration, art historians Stephanie Langin-Hooper and Rebecca Molholt began a collaboration on the works which were still assumed to have come from Antioch. But Molholt suspected that the individually broken mosaics, most of them 12 by 12 inches, pointed clearly to smuggling. It did not take her long to realize that the works were not from Antioch, as the university’s purchase records indicated, and that the pencil sketch provided by Peter Marks were “wishful thinking.” (Since his sale to Bowling Green, Marks had also published an article, “The Ethics of Art Dealing,” in the International Journal of Cultural Property, about difficulties faced by collectors and dealers given the new legal standards imposed on the purchase of artworks.) Scanning pictures of other nearby archeological sites, Molholt noticed that the color palette of the Bowling Green mosaics exactly matched those from the Zeugma excavation; one of the decorative fillings was a softly shaded lotus flower, identical to a border frame in the Gaziantep museum. It took Molholt two weeks to conclude that the mosaics were taken from the same villa as the Gypsy Girl.

In the widely publicized event of the mosaics’ rediscovery, the Turkish media expressed indignation that the works were stepped on daily (even though they were under glass) and that they were displayed at the entrance of the art center as mere decoration. The newspapers might have found a better case for offense among the Antioch mosaics at Princeton, several of which were installed without protection in lobby entrances or building exteriors as recently as 2008. Since their arrival from Antioch, they’d cracked and faded, unprotected from the effects of snow and rain.

After seven years of negotiations between Bowling Green and the Turkish government, the 12 mosaics were shipped back to Gaziantep in December 2018. In her press-conference speech, Professor Langin-Hooper called the return a “triumph,” adding,

I use that word “triumph” deliberately, as it refers in Roman times to the celebratory display of looted artworks taken by conquest, paraded through the streets of Rome. Today, however, we have a modern triumph — a reverse triumph, if you will. The looted masterpieces get to go home.

In animist art, there is a moment when putting in the eyes or the mouth of a sculpture separates the object from its maker, taking on a life of its own. The same is true of breaking apart, when a fragment takes on new meaning through all that it leaves open to the imagination. In the 18 years that she has been alone in a dimly lit room of the Zeugma Museum, the Gypsy Girl has taken on a different identity. No other mosaic in present-day Turkey has quite such a grip on the imagination, though there are many to choose from: ones that are bigger, fuller, or more easily accessed, such as the spectacular Deesis mosaic of Christ Pantocrator in Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia. Because of their relationship to the Gypsy Girl, the arrival of the 12 mosaics from Ohio was surrounded by a flurry of excitement, more than any other artwork that the Turkish government has actively sought to repatriate in the last decade, including those displayed at the The Met, the Louvre, and the Pergamon. The return was told as a tale of homecoming. “Our Gypsy Girl will finally be united with her family,” said Gaziantep’s mayor; the minister of Culture and Tourism that she would finally be united with her “sister,” meaning the sideways-glancing depiction of a Maenad, follower of Dionysus. The Maenad has vine leaves and grapes flowing out from her hair. She wears the same, golden earring as the Gypsy. But though her eyes are askance, they are mischievous and full of determination, unlike those of her sister’s.

I visited the Zeugma Museum in May 2015. The previous day, I had been at Göbeklitepe, the world’s oldest temple dating to 10,000 BC, a period before human settlement. The day before that, I was at Mor Gabriel, the oldest surviving Syriac Orthodox monastery in the world, where Aramaic is still spoken. For several years, the monastery had been under threat of losing its lands to the area’s Kurdish population as well as to the Turkish treasury. On the day of my visit, a Muslim villager had brought her sick child to the monastery for blessing. Her face was intricately tattooed; her head scarf the same dusty shade of purple as the thistles poking thickly from the parched soil. I sat down in the courtyard to rest when a priest came up to me and asked, in English, from where I was visiting. When I told him that I was Turkish, he paused, then said kindly, “Don’t worry, it’s all right.”

History surfaced all around in blaring fragments, hacked away from the pieces that joined it together, without any apparent relevance or kinship to what was happening all around. On the day I arrived in Gaziantep, the al-Nusra Front had issued a declaration of war against Kurdish militia in Aleppo, barely a three-hour drive from the Zeugma Museum and the native town of my great-grandmother. In the car, the Syrian border blurred into crimson and ink at sunset, the white peaks of refugee tents stretching for kilometers in parallel to the road.

In Greek, “zeugma” means bridge of boats, referring to those tied together to connect the two banks of the Euphrates. I learn this from a video about the Zeugma Mosaic Museum issued by the Ministry of Tourism. It is narrated by a young, enthusiastic man with an American accent. He adds, all too predictably, that the name of the ancient city is just like Turkey itself, a bridge, or better, a mosaic of civilizations.

Part of the Gypsy Girl’s power is due to her lack of denomination. It might be less apparent, for example, to call the return of a Christ mosaic to Antioch a “homecoming,” even though St. Paul and St. Peter both lived and preached in the city and there founded the first church. Yet these histories, along with the Greek and early Roman ones are almost entirely absent from the Turkish national curriculum, which mostly follows the arrival of Turks from Central Asia. The history of Anatolia springs into existence with their appearance, stifling thousands of years of multiple, intertwining inhabitation. The ancient heritage of Turkey thus requires a double-vision. It is at once there and not there, boasted and ignored.

The Gypsy Girl, however, is nothing but eyes. No part of her makes her foreign or insists on her difference. She is whatever you would like her to be. Give her a familiar name, and she becomes one of us, whereas a “Gypsy” is rootless in her wandering, easily exotic, and malleable.

A cliché about the Gypsy Girl is that she is “the Mona Lisa of Turkey.” Museum signs, newspaper articles, and online forums attempting to explain her importance invariably talk about her three-quarter look, the effect of which is that her eyes follow you everywhere. The explanation is intended to reveal the trick, to deliver the viewer from the grip of art with a rational explanation of why it moves us. What isn’t revealed with the technical description is the reason for our fascination with silent, mysterious women — from the Virgin Mary to the Mona Lisa, Botticelli’s Venus to the Gypsy Girl — why it is that the melancholy, abstract beauty of a woman, at once mature and girlish, knowing and silent, has such a hold on our imagination.

The Irish novelist Colm Tóibín writes:

It is as though her insistent and mysterious power arose precisely from her shadowy presence; it is as though the devotion to her grew from this very absence and silence. She could thus be re-created with greater force in the imagination of those who prayed to her and who sought her intercession.

Tóibín is referring to the Virgin Mary, in the afterword to his book The Testament of Mary, though he may as well be describing the Gypsy Girl. Perhaps the actual zeugma uniting civilizations across millennia and cultures is the allure of the silent woman, reproduced again and again in the history of art. These women cannot speak for themselves, because they exert no subjective selfhood in their silent gaze. There is nothing that distinguishes their true person; nothing challenging, or rebellious, to mark their unique standing. They are exotically Other — gypsy — because they are imagined and made by men and are the opposite of their makers’ subjective, embodied existence. Yet their Otherness is unthreatening: girl rather than woman. As such, they are easily possessed by the imagination and claimed as one’s own.

From its very beginning, the story of the mosaics is a story of ownership: the lands of the Euphrates contested among the Romans, Persians, Byzantines, and Ottomans; the noble families whose lavish homes attest to their wealth; the looters and the dealers; the institutions who want to display the culture at their command. There is smugness in ownership, the wish to prove that what you own rightfully belongs to you: these are our lands, our discoveries, our religion and culture. These possessions represent us more than they represent you. “[I]t must be noted that the Turks themselves can claim little credit for their archeological treasures,” a Der Spiegel article explains. Turks only arrived in Anatolia in the 11th century and therefore have no relationship to what was there before them. The suggestion is that identity and belonging are fixed, that they cannot transform, nor can they embrace what is foreign. “When the new Muslim masters took over,” the article continues, “the region’s illustrious past faded into obscurity. The water-pipe-smoking caliphs were more concerned with pursuing their own interests.” Ownership asserts itself as a moral status in face of the immoral other, insisting that the indolent caliphs are not worthy of a noble Western heritage, because to own is to be superior. It is how a tribe stamps its mark upon another; a civilization retains legitimacy; patriarchy tightens its grip. The vanquished, dispossessed of their belongings, are buried under the names, stories, and moralities assigned to them by the new titleholders.

“We liked her so much that we decided to take her under our custody,” says archeologist Rifat Ergeç about the Gypsy Girl, at a panel on Gaziantep’s history. He is part of the team that discovered the mosaic in 1998 and is humorously recounting the story of her transformation from a buried fragment to the city’s symbol. He produces a national identity card he’s prepared for the newly adopted Gypsy Girl. The father’s name is “Turkey,” mother’s name “Anatolia.” Her place of birth is Zeugma, place of registration the Gaziantep museum.

As part of his joke, Ergeç has chosen to include the mosaic’s marital status as well. This section is marked when one turns 18, as single or married. At one time, though there was no legal framework to do so, registry officers would write “Virgin” on the identity cards of young women, laying their hands on what is most private. This, too, is ownership. It is what Ergeç has decided to put down for the startled, mosaic eyes. The eyes of our girl.

The newspaper article notes that his presentation is met with laughter and applause.

Ayşegül Savaş is a writer based in Paris. Her first novel, Walking on the Ceiling, is published by Riverhead Books.

The post Whose Eyes Are These? appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2HB4NUx

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Why a Herbarium of 7.8 Million Plants Is One of New York’s Most Valuable Resources

A plant being handsewn onto a herbarium sheet at the New York Botanical Garden (photo by Ben Hider, courtesy New York Botanical Garden)

After a corpse flower opened at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) last summer, drawing 30,000 visitors in the course of its brief and pungent bloom, it received the posthumous honor of becoming the three millionth specimen digitized from the Bronx institution’s herbarium. While NYBG is among New York City’s great green wonders, it’s also home to the world’s second-largest herbarium, created just after the garden was established in 1891. The William and Lynda Steere Herbarium now houses 7.8 million plant and fungal specimens, representing biodiversity from every continent. But what is a herbarium, you might ask, and why does it matter?

Amorphophallus titanum (Corpse Flower) specimen, which bloomed at the New York Botanical Garden in July 2016, the first time a corpse flower had bloomed at NYBG since 1939. The bar code at the bottom reads: 03000000, or 3 million, meaning the corpse flower is the three millionth herbarium specimen to be digitized. (courtesy New York Botanical Garden)

“Unless you work in botany, you really don’t know what a herbarium is and what this collection is, and its broad impact,” explained Dr. Matthew Pace, assistant curator to the herbarium, during a behind-the-scenes visit by Hyperallergic. Pace is a botanist studying the diversity and evolution of New World orchids. He walked me through the mounting room, digitization lab, and one of the four levels of cabinets that make up the archive of dead plants, a significant scientific resource.

Currently, NYBG is celebrating the collection in What in the World is a Herbarium?, installed in the Ross Gallery of its Library Building. The exhibition comes at an important moment. In a 2015 article for the journal Nature, Boer Deng reported that over “100 North American herbaria have closed since 1997, leaving just over 600 remaining,” with budget cuts and a perception of them as obsolete threatening their survival. Like the NYBG herbarium, most operate out of public view, so “it’s very challenging to make the case at these small universities that its herbarium should be kept,” Pace said. He noted that NYBG often adopts “orphan herbaria,” for instance that of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, on loan in the Bronx while its scientific facilities are updated.

The one-room show answers the titular question — a herbarium is basically a botanical library of the planet — and includes selected specimens that represent current research, historical context, and oddities, like the corpse flower, with its voluminous purple bloom now flattened on an acid-free sheet of paper. Nearby are a swamp rose collected by NYBG scientist Daniel Atha in his documentation of natural plants in Central Park; a curare specimen from the Amazon, along with a blow dart that uses the tropical vine’s poison; and a bright flower of the purple loosestrife from Europe that’s been a highly invasive species in the United States since the 1830s. A video display features the diverse focuses of NYBG scientists, whether Jessica Allen’s investigation into how climate change is impacting lichen distribution in the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain or Ina Vandebroek’s connections with Caribbean immigrants in New York who have medical plant knowledge. A herbarium can offer base data for studies of climate change, invasive species, habitat loss, medicine, and conservation. Pace estimated that 20,000 hours are logged by outside visitors to the NYBG’s herbarium each year.

Installation view of What in the World is a Herbarium? at the New York Botanical Garden (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Dr. Matthew Pace in the NYBG herbarium (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

“We always try to tie in science to the garden displays, but this is the first time that we’ve highlighted the herbarium,” Pace said. As he described it, the technique of preserving plants has been consistent for centuries. “The actual process of making herbaria hasn’t changed since the time of Linnaeus,” he added, referencing the 18th-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who’s recognized as the “father of taxonomy.”

Each specimen sheet, going back to the 1700s, is arranged in almost the same way, with the pressed and dried botanical, detailed notes on where and when it was found, its environment, and a description of its color before it fades. A packet is attached for seeds or broken bits, which are incredibly valuable now for noninvasive DNA testing. This rigidity of form means that it’s feasible to quickly digitize huge quantities of herbarium specimens, and NYBG has already done so for its C. V. Starr Virtual Herbarium. As they’ve taken on this monumental task, researchers have uncovered previously overlooked specimens, such as stalks of Nootka lupine collected on Roald Amundsen’s 1903–06 Northwest Passage journey.

Securing a specimen in the mounting room (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

The mounting room is usually the first stop for specimens, where they are delicately unwrapped from newspapers printed in nearly every language. It’s encouraging to see, as a journalist in the disappearing print era, that for the botanist, newspapers remain essential. Pace noted that the material is always readily available and doesn’t damage the specimen. In turn, the papers are an unintentional representation of global culture. “You get this interesting combination of pure science and the humanities,” he said. “It’s an interesting glimpse into the world at large.” He related how a shipment of plants from a curator doing research in Tibet came wrapped in Arabic newspapers because, although they are a minority, Muslims make up a small community in the region.

A specimen being prepared in the mounting room (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Some specimens are complicated. Palm leaves must be spread across multiple pages, and cumbersome objects like Brazil nuts and fruit have to be lodged separately or suspended in spirits. (One of the three mounters working during my visit described a recent arrival that had nuts shaped like pangolins.) Yet it’s mostly a delicate process of placing the plant in a permanent pose that will suggest its living presence, held in place on the sheet by glue or thread. “It’s something that combines scientific knowledge and artistry,” Pace said. Duplicates are shared with other herbaria, in case of the tragic loss of an entire collection, such as when Berlin’s Botanic Garden was firebombed in 1943.

Specimens being photographed in the Digital Imaging Center (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

A mounted specimen’s next trip is to the futuristic Digital Imaging Center, where, when I visited, four people were photographing specimens in light boxes. The resulting high-resolution images are accessible to scientists and the public through the online herbarium. “NYBG has been a leader in digitizing its plant specimens,” Pace said. “The purpose is to make our specimens as widely known as possible.” Currently, about 30,000 records are being added by staff and volunteers each month.

Following the entry into the digital archive, a specimen is placed in the climate-controlled herbarium cabinets. Even if, say, the curious shape of a spiny palm fruit doesn’t excite you, it’s incredible to be able to look at fungi collected by George Washington Carver for his research on crop diseases, moss picked on Charles Darwin’s 19th-century Beagle Voyage, and a clematis collected in 1771 on Captain James Cook’s expedition.

Moss collected on Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

A specimen collected on Captain Cook’s first voyage (1768–71) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

It may seem obvious, but our human existence is entwined with the protection and survival of these plants. With scientific and environmental funding increasingly threatened in the United States, What in the World is a Herbarium? highlights how ecological crises and the intricacies of nature can be examined through a resource of the global present and past. One ghost of conservation on view is an 1891 chestnut tree specimen. It was collected the very year NYBG was founded, when chestnuts proliferated on the East Coast. Due to an invasive fungal disease from Asia, discovered only a few years later at the Bronx Zoo by an NYBG scientist, four billion of those chestnut trees would die over the next five decades.

“The whole purpose is to make this last forever,” Pace said of the herbarium. “There’s a connection to the people who have worked here before you and put all this care into collecting and researching these specimens. Now I’m in the same position, to be sure that scientists in the future can have that same access.”

Castanea dentata (American Chestnut) specimen, collected in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park in 1891, only a few years before a NYBG scientist diagnosed chestnut blight on trees in the Bronx Zoo (courtesy New York Botanical Garden)

The William and Lynda Steere Herbarium (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

An early 1900s specimen with seaweed shaped into a horse (an unusual choice for a herbarium) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

One of the climate-controlled cabinets of the NYBG Herbarium (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Rosa palustris (Swamp Rose) specimen collected by NYBG scientist Daniel Atha in New York City’s Central Park, where he is working to document all of the park’s naturally occurring plants (courtesy New York Botanical Garden)

Specimens in the Steere Herbarium, including one of the corpse flower specimens at center (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

A specimen that has been used for molecular study (note the segment in its leaf) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Chondrodendron tomentosum (Curare) specimen, with a poison dart — an extract from the tropical Amazonian vine is the poison used on blow darts. (courtesy New York Botanical Garden)

Specimen of Purple Loosestrife, an invasive European weed that has crowded out native American species since the 1830s, on view in What in the World is a Herbarium? (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Congea specimen collected in Myanmar by NYBG scientist Kate Armstrong, on view in What in the World is a Herbarium? (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Egyptian white water-lily specimen on view in What in the World is a Herbarium? (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

English oak specimen, with its acorns tied to the sheet, on view in What in the World is a Herbarium? (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

What in the World is a Herbarium? continues at the New York Botanical Garden (2900 Southern Boulevard, The Bronx) through October 29.

The post Why a Herbarium of 7.8 Million Plants Is One of New York’s Most Valuable Resources appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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