- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Emily Meineke, assistant professor of urban landscape entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, helped launch the project in 2017 when she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Herbaria.
The exhibit in Cambridge, Mass., is “an immersive multidisciplinary experience that marries art and science through a modern artistic interpretation of Henry David Thoreau's preserved plants,” said Bethany Carland-Adams, a public relations specialist with Harvard Museums of Science and Culture (HMSC).
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), naturalist, author and philosopher and a 1837 graduate of Harvard University, is best known for his book Walden. Removing himself from social life, he settled into a cabin by Walden Pond, Concord, Mass., from July 1845 to September 1847 to immerse himself in nature.
The 648 plant specimens that Thoreau donated to the museum form the foundation of the exhibit. "He was prolific in his practice of collecting botanical samples and plants are important indicators of how our world is responding to climate change," Carland-Adams said in a press release.
Meineke, who joined the UC Davis faculty in 2020, served as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University Herbaria from 2016 to 2019, including a National Science Foundation-sponsored fellowship there in 2017. She holds a doctorate in entomology from North Carolina State University (2016), Raleigh, where she wrote her dissertation on “Understanding the Consequences of Urban Warming for Street Trees and Their Pests.”
“Ultimately, we landed on using visual media and portraits to highlight the decline of local plants," Meineke said. "Those art works are now central to the exhibit, as are Thoreau's actual specimens provided by Harvard and descriptions of the discoveries made possible by his work as a naturalist.”
The exhibit includes Meineke's work on insect herbivore-plant interactions over the period of recent climate change as one type of research made possible by Thoreau's plant collections.
“The digitization of the specimens, and others in the Herbaria collection, are now allowing broader access to scholars and citizen scientists, in turn welcoming new domains of scholarship,” Carland-Adams noted. "The exhibition invites visitors to experience emotionally resonant connections to the profound loss of natural diversity caused by human-induced climate change. The exhibition urges us to ask, 'What do Thoreau's findings tell us about what plants are winning, and what plants are losing, in the face of climate change today?'"
Charles Davis, curator of vascular plants at Harvard University Herbaria, teamed with Marsha Gordon, a North Carolina State University professor, and Meineke to frame plans for the exhibit, collaborating with artists Leah Sobsey and Robin Vuchnich, both university faculty members, to shape the vision.
Vuchnich, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, leveraged the digitized specimens to craft an immersive experience in the gallery theater. It includes animations of the herbarium images and soundscapes recorded at Walden Pond.
Sobsey, an associate professor of photography and director of the Gatewood Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, focused on cyanotype, a 19th-century photographic process that relies on UV light to create a distinctive Prussian blue tone. Sobsey utilized all 648 digitized Thoreau specimens, and created a wallpaper comprised of original cyanotypes and digital imagery, relating a story of the survival and decline of plant specimens.
In the news release, HMSC executive director Brenda Tindal emphasized the significance of Thoreau's observations and his indelible impact on society..."Thoreau's clarion call compels us to intentionally lean into our surroundings and learn from nature—and by extension, the global community to which we all belong.”
Visitors will gain "a deeper understanding of how different plant species respond to environmental factors, within and between species," Carland-Adams shared. "For instance, some plants are sensitive to temperature, while others show less or no sensitivity. This type of data drives the exhibition's animations and directly impacts our daily lives in the context of agriculture and food production."
The Thoreau exhibit may also become a traveling exhibit.
The HMSC mission "is to foster curiosity and a spirit of discovery in visitors of all ages by enhancing public understanding of and appreciation for the natural world, science, and human cultures," according to its website. "HMSC works in concert with Harvard faculty, museum curators, and students, as well as with members of the extended Harvard community, to provide interdisciplinary exhibitions, events and lectures, and educational programs for students, teachers, and the public. HMSC draws primarily upon the extensive collections of the member museums and the research of their faculty and curators."
Resources:
- Harvard Museum of Natural History Website
- Press Release
- Podcast: Listen to the HMSC Connects! featuring host Jennifer Berglund, entomologist Emily Meineke, and artists Robin Vuchnich and Leah Sobsey. (Read the transcript)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
“However, the plants that are keeping up with climate change might also experience costs to earlier leaf-out,” said Meineke, lead author of the first-of-its-kind study, Phenological Sensitivity to Temperature Mediates Herbivory.
One of the costs is that “early” species get eaten more in warmer years. “This seems to be because when they leaf out earlier,” she said, “they also lengthen the amount of time herbivores have in a given year to eat their leaves.”
Two plant species that showed higher insect damage due to rising temperatures were two native blueberries: Vaccinium angustifolium, a wild lowbush blueberry native to eastern and central Canada and the northeastern United States, and Vaccinium corymbosum, the northern highbush blueberry, a native North American species and a significant commercial food crop.
The publication is the result of a massive five-year research project involving herbarium specimens collected from the northeastern United States and France from 1900 to 2015. These two areas have warmed more than the global average, Meineke said, and the plants studied are distributed widely across them.
Meineke, an assistant professor who joined the UC Davis faculty in March 2020, launched her research while a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Herbaria, where she studied how worldwide urbanization and climate change have affected plant-insect relationships over the past century.
“This was a true collaboration,” Meineke said. “Each of us was interested in different pieces of the research. Davies and Davis brought the phenology hypotheses and expertise, and I brought an interest in/knowledge of herbivory and how it may change as the climate warms.”
The authors wrote that “both insect and plant development are sensitive to temperature, though the specific cues plants and associated insects use to time life history events may differ and include photoperiod, chilling, ‘forcing' and precipitation. For the vast majority of insect and plant species, the combined and relative contributions of these cues have not been well characterized.”
The specimens studied were selected first on the basis of the availability of previously published phenological sensitivity metrics: flowering sensitivity and leaf-out sensitivity. “We use the general term ‘phenological sensitivity' to refer to the extent to which a particular life event (e.g., for plants, budbreak, leaf-out, flowering, fruiting) responds to temperature from year to year (e.g. days change in phenology per ‘C' warming),” they explained.
The next step? “We are now beginning to look into whether and how herbivory might have shifted over time in California native plants,” Meineke said. “Our focal species so far is the valley oak, Quercus lobata, but we hope to eventually expand these observations to more taxa. We're also looking into other mechanisms that might drive herbivory shifts here in the west, where phenology is driven more by moisture than by temperature.”
A native of Greenville, N.C., Meineke holds a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina in environmental science, with a minor in biology, and a doctorate in entomology from North Carolina State University where she completed her dissertation, "Understanding the Consequences of Urban Warming for Street Trees and Their Insect Pests.”
The project was supported by a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology in a grant awarded to Meineke.
The abstract:
Species interactions drive ecosystem processes and are a major focus of global change research. Among the most consequential interactions expected to shift with climate change are those between insect herbivores and plants, both of which are highly sensitive to temperature. Insect herbivores and their host plants display varying levels of synchrony that could be disrupted or enhanced by climate change, yet empirical data on changes in synchrony are lacking. Using evidence of herbivory on herbarium specimens collected from the northeastern United States and France from 1900 to 2015, we provide evidence that plant species with temperature‐sensitive phenologies experience higher levels of insect damage in warmer years, while less temperature‐sensitive, co‐occurring species do not. While herbivory might be mediated by interactions between warming and phenology through multiple pathways, we suggest that warming might lengthen growing seasons for phenologically sensitive plant species, exposing their leaves to herbivores for longer periods of time in warm years. We propose that elevated herbivory in warm years may represent a previously under appreciated cost to phenological tracking of climate change over longer timescales.
