Caleb Morse -
Collection manager, R. L. McGregor Herbarium
R. Steve Dick/University Relations
Caleb Morse displays a specimen at the R.L. McGregor Herbarium. The herbarium is one of 12 units of the Biodiversity Institute and houses thousands of botanical samples.
Years at current job: Nine.
Job duties: My primary responsibility is to look after the day-to-day care of the collection. This includes making decisions about materials and techniques for specimen preservation and preparation, monitoring and improving various elements of the storage environment at Bridwell Lab (where the collection is housed), sending out loans for use in scientific research at other institutions, receiving loans for research by KU scientists and overseeing the acquisition of new specimens. In doing this, I supervise several student employees who do most of the work of mounting new specimens, capturing specimen data in our relational database and filing specimens away. When I can, I spend time in the field, collecting new specimens to add to our holdings.
You and Craig Freeman of the Kansas Biological Survey have a spring flora tour of campus planned. How well would you say the campus flora represents that of the Central Plains?
The short answer is, not so well. By and large, the diversity of what we see on campus -- including the great majority of herbaceous plants and shrubs -- are cultivated plants native to other parts of the world. Some of the trees, such as the ashes, elms, hackberries, honey locusts, sugar maples, sycamores and most of the oaks, are native to eastern Kansas. The Kentucky coffee trees and cottonwoods in Marvin Grove are native. Of the showier, flowering trees, only the redbuds are native. Historically, however, all of these woody plants would have been restricted to valleys and river courses, or north-facing slopes, and they are much more common today than they would have been prior to Euro-American settlement. Early photos of the KU campus reveal that Mount Oread -- like the rest of Kansas -- was pretty much treeless, dominated by tallgrass prairie. Along these lines, I should note that Kansas has only a single native evergreen, the eastern redcedar, which is also present on campus. Today, this species is easy to find throughout the state, but the earliest report on the Kansas flora, published by James H. Carruth in 1872, lists this species as "rare."
The herbarium studies flora of the Central Plains. Why is it important to document and preserve the botanical life of this specific area of the world? Firstly, it's important to document and preserve the native plants in every area of the world, because each region's flora is important and unique, and native plants play a crucial role in the ecology of that region. More than that, each species of plant plays a part in that dynamic ecosystem. Preserving and managing for native plant diversity means more than just maintaining fields of glorious wildflowers. It means protecting insects, birds and mammals -- not to mention all the other organisms in that spot -- from local and range-wide extinction. It also means limiting soil erosion, recharging groundwater systems, moderating temperature and a whole host of other benefits.
Unfortunately, it's not good news. Across the Great Plains, a large and homogeneous area that is home to many species with extensive ranges, it's estimated that we've lost about 70 percent of our native grasslands. The magnitude of this loss is itself a bit difficult to comprehend, but perhaps equally detrimental to our native plants are the insidious effects of habitat fragmentation, or the patchy way in which remaining native grasslands have been preserved.
Habitat fragmentation results in isolation of individual populations and may mean loss of genetic diversity and consequent decline or even local extinction of these populations over time. This has effects at the local and regional level, not only because it means loss of genetic diversity for that species, but also because the fate of one species may be linked to the fates of others. Another consequence of habitat destruction is the introduction of non-native species into the ecosystem. We've documented more than 400 species (of about 2,100 in total) in the Kansas flora that were not here prior to settlement by Euro-Americans. Some of these introduced species pose a serious and direct threat to native plant communities. So protecting native grasslands now depends on active management, and restoration or even recreation of habitats in order to link fragmented populations together. It also depends on monitoring populations of invasive species and implementing programs to control them. That said, our main efforts in the herbarium have focused on documenting the region's native and non-native flora. Before you protect something, it helps to know what you are protecting. We provide baseline data that help others make informed conservation decisions and against which changes in the flora can be measured.
Urban sprawl is frequently cited as a serious concern for wildlife. Is this a concern for flora as well, and if so, how serious is the threat in the area you study? Across the Great Plains, urban sprawl probably does not pose a significant threat to native habitat, although conversion of quality native sites to agricultural uses clearly still does. Here in the eastern part of Kansas, historical losses have been significant. A recent study headed by Kelly Kindscher at the Kansas Biological Survey found that in each the five counties surrounding the metro KC area only between 0 percent and 0.5 percent of the original tallgrass prairie remains. (Range-wide, it's estimated that about 13 percent of the tallgrass prairie remains.) Kindscher is still analyzing some of these results for Douglas County, but tells me that loss of habitat is still going on here at a pretty alarming rate. He estimates that we have lost as much as 20 percent of the high quality tallgrass prairie that still remained in the late 1980s. Surprisingly, much of this loss is due -- at least in the short term -- to agricultural conversion and not directly from construction of new subdivisions.
Continuing suburban expansion into rural areas around the KC metro area does pose more indirect threats to native plant communities. It's harder to restore or re-establish native habitat when it is surrounded by -- or underneath -- housing, than when it is undergoing agricultural uses. Some species used in suburban plantings may pose threats to native plant communities. For instance, it appears that purple loosestrife (a problem weed in native wetlands in the northeast) is currently becoming established in wetlands around Lawrence. Introduction of this plant is probably due, at least in part, to spread from flowerbeds. Finally, from a political and cultural standpoint, it becomes a difficult prospect to manage remaining native habitats with controlled burns when they are adjacent to suburban subdivisions. While you can simulate some natural management by mowing, haying or even light grazing, the native grasslands that once dominated our area are clearly fire-adapted and require periodic burning to thrive.
How does the herbarium share the information it already has with and gather new information from those beyond the university community? The traditional way in which we share the information housed in herbaria is by loaning specimens to researchers for use in their studies. There are always new kinds of taxonomic, phylogenetic and ecological information to be gleaned from the specimens themselves. With increasing frequency, herbaria are disseminating information about their collections through queries of their databases. Our databases, for instance, currently contain almost 200,000 records, comprising all specimen-level data for about 56 percent of our holdings. (And we added about 15,000 new records last year.) These data may be used in various ways, such as in mapping current distributions of species or in developing predictive models for changes in distributions, given changes in certain environmental parameters.
At present, we provide results of database queries to scientists for use in their research only upon request, but in 2008 our data will be Web-accessible. In addition to disseminating and receiving information in this way, we do so through regular communication with the network of researchers working in other institutions around the country and world, and through publication of our findings in reports and in peer-reviewed journals that cater to plant taxonomists and ecologists.
What do you enjoy most about your profession? I really enjoy the diversity of things I get to do. My job is rarely boring to me, and there are always interesting new things to learn from and about the collection. I'm lucky to be able to pursue a research program as well, which gets me out into the field several times a year. And I enjoy the service component of my job. I lead a couple wildflower walks in eastern Kansas each year, where I get to show people interesting, live plants where they're growing. The curators and I also spend a considerable amount of time each year answering questions about plants and providing species identifications to university researchers, state agency employees and members of the general public. Our expertise is not necessarily in how to grow (or eradicate) it, but we can usually tell you what it is.
How are the collections of botanical specimens maintained to ensure they will be viable for future years' research and documentation? Most botanical specimens have been preserved with good results using approximately the same techniques employed since before Linnaeus' day. The first challenge is to get the plants flat and dry (before they start to mold) and then keep them dry. Our methods of mounting dried specimens have improved somewhat over the years, however: We use high quality papers, better glues and more fully reversible preparation methods (like archival tapes and thread). Of course, the specimens are always handled with care and stored in a controlled environment. We monitor for insects in the building and freeze all incoming specimens, as a preventive, pest-management measure that is non-toxic to herbarium employees and keep our specimens sealed inside steel cabinets, away from insects, light and sudden shifts in temperature and relative humidity.
What are some aspects of your job others might not realize you're involved with? For the past several years, the largest side project I've been involved in is a study of the lichens of Kansas and the southern Great Plains, something I'm working on with a couple collaborators. Our region is a place that lichenologists have traditionally thought to be more or less devoid of lichens and, consequently, it's one of the poorest known in North America for these tiny organisms. I spend my time in the field whacking bits of bark off trees and hammering pieces of rocks from outcrops and my lab time looking at the lichens that grow on those substrates. It's exciting work in its own way, and we're finding pretty cool stuff here, including species and even genera new to science.
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