Dr. Chelsea Miller is a new postdoc, hosted by Holden to explore range dynamics of spring ephemeral wildflowers. Interested in possible career pathways in the world of public gardens, Chelsea independently wrote a grant to the National Science Foundation to fund a research project harnessing the power of collections held at public gardens. Chelsea’s home base is here at Holden, but she’ll be working with spring ephemeral collections housed at Huntsville Botanical Garden, Missouri Botanical Garden, Dawes Arboretum, Chicago Botanic Garden, as well as right here at Holden. 

In Chelsea’s words… “the project is concerned with integrating phenological traits (both ‘intrinsic’, such as leaf-out, and ‘extrinsic’, such as duration of pollination) into species distribution models for key spring ephemeral species. We intend to use living collections of spring ephemeral plants with known planting and provenance data across a network of botanical gardens and arboreta as a de facto common garden. Under this framework, we intend to address whether phenological traits of spring ephemerals are locally adapted or exhibit plasticity, and how this will impact predictions of climate change-driven range shifts for these species.””

More cool science to come…