2019
I was thrilled that Anke Jentsch (University of
Bayreuth, Germany), with whom I have worked for some 20+ years, contemplated
the nature of theory in ecology and published a paper titled “A
theory of pulse dynamics and disturbance in ecology” in the Spring. Theory is not
easy to write in ecology, for reasons we discuss.
In teaching conservation biology,
I have cited the reservation of martime oak forests
along Southastern coast lines as one of the first
instances of the public ownership and conservation (albeit for continuing
supply of wood for ship building) of forests in the US. President John Quincy Adams began live oak
forest protection in 1828. In the Spring, I got to visit one such tract near Pensacola,
Florida, that is now part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore. Here are some pictures: 1, 2, 3, 4. The Navy
continued using wooden ships into the late 1800s. “Old Ironsides” was named
because of the strength of its live oak construction.
What makes
a good question? Dean Urban of Duke uses
a template with students that I have borrowed (this is my version, I hope it is
faithful to the original). Every graduate project has three sections: 1. Houston, We Have A
Problem (the statement, context, and general questions addressed); 2. Here’s What We know About The Problem (literature review); and 3.
Thank God For Me! (Here are my
questions, how I will answer them, and the implications the answers will
have). But what makes a good question in
ecology? Starting 10+ years ago, I’ve
had periodic discussions with colleagues…here is a
current statement and comments are welcome.
The THREADS of conservation biology. I teach Conservation Biology using this outline:
ethics and philosophy of conservation, biodiversity and its threats, foundation
paradigms (the description of how biodiversity is distributed through the
species-area relation and the distance decay of similarity, the theory of
island biogeography), conservation genetics, populations, metapopulations,
rarity and endangerment, ex situ conservation, reintroduction, invasives, communities, ecosystems, landscapes,
fragmentation and edges, restoration, and ecosystem management. Over the years I’ve seen that there are
threads that run through all these subjects and at the beginning and end of
class I tell the students what these threads are. There have been as many as 18 and as few as 9
over the years. Currently there are 15
and I’ve linked them here…comments welcome.
2018
Where was
Scott’s Hole?
This botanical mystery was inspired by the work of the great botanist Rogers McVaugh. Rogers and his son worked on a project to publish
and interpret the botanical notes of Elisha Mitchell (for whom the highest
mountain eastern North America, Mt. Mitchell, North Carolina) is named. Mitchell taught botany at the University of
North Carolina in the 1930s and kept a diary.
The long version of the story and our hunt for the location of Scott’s
Hole in Chapel Hill is told here. The short version is that Mitchell puzzled
over a plant that was like Lindera benzoin, but
different, eventually sending a specimen to Schweinitz
who was then at Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC. It was identified as Lindera
mellisifolia, a rare plant previously thought
restricted to the coastal plain. We have
theories, but no proof, as to the location of Scott’s Hole…and several hunts
have failed to turn up any sign of the rare plant, almost 200 years since it
was last seen. See 2008 below for
another botanical mystery: Linnaea borealis in Tennessee (Great Smoky Mountains
National Park).
The UNC Plant
Ecology lab is reducing in size after some 30 years and some 40 PhD
students, 38 MS students, some 12 postdocs, many undergraduates and many
collaborators. Bob Peet retired in 2018
and I will following within a year or so. Both of us stopped taking students 3
years ago…Alan Weakley, Director of the UNC Herbarium
as part of the North Carolina Botanical Garden continues a strong research
program with six current students.
2016
Memories! I have recorded 3 videos as part of the oral
history of the North Carolina Botanical Garden (the Garden is celebrating its
50th Anniversary in 2016) and a 4th video based on the
lecture I gave at the Pritzlaff Conservation
Symposium at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden in 2015. I was also interviewed on my thoughts by
Garden staff in 2016…and my thoughts on the Garden were part of two talks I’ve
given in the last year or so, the talk I gave at the Pritzlaff
Conservation Symposium and the keynote I gave at the first APGA Native Plant
Conference at Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center (both events were in 2015).
The 4 videos on YouTube are:
1. A 7 minute discussion of the
transition we went through from “A Garden of Native Plants” to “A Conservation
Garden”:
2. “The Future of Botanical Gardens: The Conservation
Garden”: A 20 minute discussion of the Garden’s conservation mission—defining the
Conservation Garden and thinking about the future of botanical gardens:
3. “Celebrating 28 Years”: A 30 minute celebration of my
memories of the 28 years I served as director of the Garden:
4. “Botanical Garden Futures:
Lessons learned, dreams dreamed for the conservation garden” (the Pritzlaff
Lecture given in Santa Barbara in 2015—this is a longer version of “Botanical
Garden Futures: The Conservation Garden” above):
I also
wanted to share my thoughts on the future of Gardens in essay form…I called
this “Message
in a Bottle: Postscript (the future and identity of gardens)”. I felt that was what I was doing—l was
leaving some thoughts behind as I left the Garden based on what I (and we)
learned during those years. Like a
message in a bottle, I have no idea whether anyone will read these thoughts or
find them useful.
In addition, I wrote an essay
called “Administrative Lessons”—the administrative side of what I learned as
director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden. The American Public Garden Association
published a brief reference to this essay and link to the fuller statement in Public
Garden, Vol. 31, Issue 2, for May 2016.
For those of you that end up in leadership positions, HERE are my
thoughts. And to keep the workplace fair
and open, HERE is an employee bill of rights I
posted at the Garden.
I have just been named to the
list of 100 most influential people in the history of Great Smoky Mountains
National Park. This list was assembled
as part of the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service and
spans individuals from about 1900 to the present from all walks of life who
have contributed to the conservation of the Smokies. I am thrilled! An overview is linked HERE. It is easy to fall in love with Great Smoky
Mountains National Park—and the National Park Service—and stay that way! Now up to three medals! Click HERE to see them.
Some readers know about my bike
lane art project. It started with lucky
coins and seeds in the bike lane (as I commute to UNC and back to
Carrboro). I gave a talk for Garden volunteers
called “Botanical Lessons of the Bike Lane” (seeds of Silver Maple, Sycamore,
pollen, falling leaves and more). But
there was more (see blurb.com and search for “bike lane art”)…and now I have
three photographs in a bike-themed art show, June to October. Click HERE.
2015
Here I am with my two medals!
November 6th: I
presented a talk on conservation in gardens at a symposium at the Santa Barbara
Botanic Garden, a part of being presented with the Priztlaff Conservation Award. A nice video was shown,
linked HERE.
UNC gave me a very nice recognition
on University Day, October 12th: the Edward Kidder Graham
Award! HERE. A picture HERE.
The thank you I gave at the morning breakfast is linked HERE.
2014
November-December 2014: More
awards! HERE.
This summer, one of the
undergraduates (now graduated) from Conservation Biology, BIO 565, has been
writing me amazing reports from her internship with the Smithsonian in
Panama. They were infectious, so the
Office of Undergraduate Research posted them HERE.
August 14th: My sixth and
latest appearance on “Exploring North Carolina with Tom Earnhardt”, a show on
“Native Intelligence” is linked HERE.
July 11th: The Big
News is that I’ve decided to move fully into my 9-month faculty position after
28 amazing years as director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden—I get to
enjoy students, academic and intellectual time, teaching, and writing and the
Garden gets its first full time director!
The Garden has become a fabulous place with the Platinum Education
Center, closing of Laurel Hill Road, the addition of the UNC Herbarium, Battle
Park, and Forest Theatre, and the flowering of its conservation, education, and
research programs. Read my letter to
staff HERE.
April: I was given the STAR Award
by the Center for Plant Conservation, see press release HERE.
Ed Johnson, as editor of the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of
America, has invited short essays to present “paper trails”—papers of influence
that weave through ecology—to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the
society (2015). I considered papers of
Frank Preston that influenced greatly my interest in species richness and beta
diversity. If you haven’t read Preston’s
papers, try them out. They are full of
thought experiments and fresh and idiosyncratic writing. But I ended up settling on Alex Watt’s 1947
paper, Pattern and process in the plant community (the inspiration of the title
of the first paper I published, “Pattern, process, and natural disturbance in
vegetation”). My draft essay is linked HERE.
Comments welcome.
Tim Spira, an ecologist at Clemson, is writing a book “Waterfalls
and Wildflowers” and asked some colleagues to write 12 line poems for the
beginning of each chapter—he asked me to do one for a chapter on communities…so
here goes:
Forest and the Trees
Maple, ash,
and birch
Hemlock,
basswood, beech
What is this
assembled crew?
A slow
grower, fast grower
A shade
lover, sun lover
Some pay
birds for travelling seeds
Others send
seeds freely on the wind
These trees
Have
different personalities
But are they
the pieces of a symphony
Or just some
random company?
Sit and listen,
sit and watch, enjoy the forest’s mysteries.
2013
Two papers on environmental ethics, one with PhD student Julie
Tuttle and the other a pretty far out argument about intrinsic value in
biodiversity, are now published in Conservation Biology! They are linked HERE.
I was part of a large group of vegetation ecologists who pooled
data to ask whether forest structure mediated the effects of climate warming on
the forest floor, with consequences for how the rate of forest harvest effects
climate response, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences and linked HERE.
I gave “Turn the Poet Out-of-Doors: A Natural History of Robert
Frost” at the Garden on March 20th, and was interviewed by the Daily
Tarheel, linked HERE.
I gave the talk in December at Carol Woods in Chapel Hill.
2012
This November I got my first ever invitation to give a seminar
in an English Department—invited by Frost scholar Bob Faggen to give “Turn the
Poet Out-of-Doors: a Natural History of Robert Frost” at Claremont McKenna
College, a trip that also involved participating in two English Department classes
(gardens in literature with Jamaica Kincaid and American poetry with Bob
Faggen).
I was named a Home Town Hero by WCHL for the third time this
year! Credit goes to the Garden staff.
2011
Very very strange: a 2009 paper, linked HERE, cites Nekola and White 1999 in
the prediction of the location of Osama bin Laden…this and a paper highlighted
on the Colbert Report (see below) certainly boggles the mind!
Late in 2010, we heard that the Education Center HAD been
certified as Platinum by the US Green Building Council, the first Platinum
building on any UNC campus, the first in state government, the fourth in the
State as a whole, and the first that is a public museum.
2010
Interview on North Carolina People with Bill Friday (UNC TV) about
the North Carolina Botanical Garden, including the new Education Center, the
Coker Arboretum, the Herbarium, and other programs, click HERE and look for May 7th, 2010, in
the index.
Beyond Naturalness, Rethinking Park and Wilderness Stewardship in
an Era of Rapid Change (Island Press), the product of a group of us that had
two great workshops in Montana, is out, click HERE.
Article in Science on Mountain Top Mining published January 8th,
2010, linked HERE and press
coverage linked HERE. The lead author of the paper, Margaret
Palmer, was on
the Colbert Report on Monday evening, January 18th! In the Spring, EPA
announced new guidelines for mountain top removal based on environmental
impacts.
Tom Earnhardt’s program on Mason Farm Biological Reserve and the
2009
The
Tom Earnhardt’s program on
the 75th Anniversary of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the
ATBI, featuring an interview with me and others, airs statewide on Exploring
North Carolina January 15 (8:30 pm), 16 (9:30 pm), and 18 (6 pm) on UNC-TV.
2008
Statement for the
Senate Hearing on the ATBI in Great Smoky Mountains National Park (July 21,
2008); Podcast
from the State of Things with Frank Stasio (WUNC,
91.5 FM); A powerpoint introduction to the ATBI
that I presented at the Highlands Biological Station in 2007 is HERE.
The Search for Linnaea borealis in
Beyond Naturalness Project,
Wilderness Institute, University of Montana, first discussion paper
Visitor Education Center Under Construction at the North Carolina Botanical Garden
