Research
Department News
March 24, 2023
Science on Friday: The Challenges of Rhododendron Research
By Sharon Halkovics, Research Specialist
Rhododendrons are loved by many gardeners for their bright, kaleidoscopic spring flowers. They are special for many reasons, including rhododendron being one of the most species-rich genus of woody flowering plants comprised of over 1,000 species.
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January 6, 2023
Science on Friday: From horticultural hero to cancer cure, what research has your Rhododendron done today?
By Juliana S. Medeiros, PhD, Plant Biologist
Your Rhododendrons are probably looking a little sad right now, amidst the cold wind and snows of January. They are probably drooping their leaves, maybe they have lost their beautiful dark green glossy leaf color, or maybe they have lost their leaves altogether, sleeping away the dreary days.
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December 19, 2022
Great Lakes, Great Trees
Wandering the Holden Arboretum, it’s all too easy to take in the trees, stroll the boardwalk and stop to smell the flowers without ever knowing the impact the Holden team is having outside Kirtland. Over in the Ellen Corning Long and T. Dixon Long Center for Plant and Environmental Science, researchers are caring for trees at every stage of life: preparing just-collected seeds to spend a winter in cold storage, watering young seedlings growing in pots in the greenhouse, pruning adult trees in the research orchard and studying trees as they succumb to disease at the end of their lives. Their hope is that these trees — the ones that survive — might hold the key to saving their species.
These American trees are ash, beech and hemlocks. They’re native to the region, are important components of local forest ecosystems and are each under serious threat from their own suite of invasive pests. The emerald ash borer has ravaged populations of ash, American beech is falling ill from beech bark disease and beech leaf disease, while hemlock wooly adelgid (a small aphid-like insect) and elongate hemlock scale are killing eastern hemlock trees across the country.
December 8, 2022
The Sweet Side of Winter: Carbohydrate Dynamics during Cold Acclimation
Deciduous plants such as maple trees lose their leaves in winter, and this helps them to survive cold temperatures, but what about our evergreen friends, how are they handling the cold? The answer is, they brace themselves for cold temperatures through a process called cold acclimation.
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December 2, 2022
Why We’re Celebrating Soil for World Soil Day — And You Should Too!
By Anna Funk, Ph.D., Science Communication Specialist
We’re surrounded by soils. They’re not just outside, but underneath us, supporting our structures and our homes as well as our ecosystems and food systems. But perhaps the most amazing thing about soil is the organisms that live in it. We’ve only just begun to understand the immense quantity and diversity of bacteria, fungi and more that live belowground. And the more researchers learn, the more it’s clear: There’s so much that we don’t know about these living things.
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November 18, 2022
Where do we stand today?
By Hector Ortiz
There was a time in North America when people saw plants and land as sacred, a gift from the Gods. The use and cultivation of some of those sacred plants and land was restricted to only tribal priests, medicine men, chiefs, and warriors.
You might think, “We are far from that time, this only exists in the history books, in the archaeological records, in the museum collections at the Smithsonian, or portrayed in the famous 90’s movies “Dance with the Wolves” and “The last of the Mohicans”. Or, you may think, this happened in a faraway land.
November 10, 2022
New Graduate Student in the Medeiros Lab: Miranda Shetzer
I recently began a PhD program where I am hosted jointly by Case Western Reserve University and the Holden Arboretum. The BioScience Alliance program promotes collaboration across research facilities in the Cleveland metropolitan area including CWRU, the Holden Arboretum, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.
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October 13, 2022
An Inside Look at the Global Botanic Gardens Congress
By Connor Ryan, MS, Rhododendron Collections Manager
The last week of September I attended the 7th Global Botanic Gardens Congress in Melbourne, Australia. This is a semi-regular meeting of botanic gardens staff sponsored by Botanic Gardens Conservation International. More than 500 people attended from across the world. The theme of the Congress was “Botanic Gardens as Agents of Change” and talks and tours centered around how gardens can make a difference in plant conservation, in curbing climate change, and in engaging our communities.
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October 7, 2022
Science on Friday: Why are there bags on the Rhododendrons?
By Jean Burns, PhD, Department of Biology - Case Western Reserve University
If you have walked around Holden Arboretum in the last few summers, you may have noticed white pollination bags on some of the Rhododendrons. The Rhododendron gardens are not only beautiful to walk through, they are also a valuable scientific collection of diversity from all around the world! The National Science Foundation has awarded the Burns lab a grant, which takes advantage of this amazing collection (DEB 2217714). We are exploring the mechanisms that allow some plants to thrive under stressors, like disease, drought, or flooding. Understanding these mechanisms is becoming ever more important as climate changes threaten global food security.
September 30, 2022
Science on Friday: Trivia Answers and Farewell to Mushroom Month
By Claudia Bashian-Victoroff, MS, Research Specialist
September is ending and fall is in full swing. As the leaves on the trees start to change and the wind turns chilly, we bid farewell to mushroom month. But have no fear, mushrooms will continue to appear in lawns and woods for a few more weeks! The end of mushroom month means that it is time to announce our trivia answers and to congratulate our participants!
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September 23, 2022
Inside a Scientific Conference: Mycological Society of America
By Claudia Bashian-Victoroff, MS, Research Specialist
Every year in July the mycologists of America converge for a week of academic talks, scientific posters, riveting discussions about fungal biology, and professional networking. This year, I was lucky to go to Gainesville, Florida to participate in my fourth Mycological Society of America (MSA) meeting. After meeting virtually for the past two years, this year’s meeting brought a lot of excitement… despite the hot and humid weather of Florida in mid-July!
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September 15, 2022
For the Love of Fungi: an ode to the amateur mycologist
By Claudia Bashian-Victoroff, MS, Research Specialist
Mycology, or the study of fungi, is a small but growing field. For many of us career mycologists this has been a curious but fantastic trend to see. Not long ago I was shyly describing my job to inquisitive relatives and family friends, or trying desperately to convince people to care about the strange and often overlooked fungal kingdom. In the past few years that has all changed.
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September 8, 2022
Connecting Above- and Below-Ground Worlds
By Sarah Kyker, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Associate
We are continuing to celebrate National Mushroom Month at HF&G all September long! Today, we want to appreciate fungi even when they are not fruiting. While mushrooms and other sporocarps are great and certainly worth celebrating, they are a short stage in the fungal life cycle. The majority of a fungus’s life is spent belowground and out of sight, as fungal hyphae.
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September 2, 2022
Science on Friday: Mushroom Month Trivia
By Claudia Bashian-Victoroff, MS, Research Specialist
September is one of our favorite months in the Holden Forests & Gardens Soil Ecology lab. Why? Because it is National Mushroom Month. Many people celebrate National Mushroom Month by cooking and eating their favorite mushrooms. And we do too! But we also celebrate the month by appreciating all that fungi do for the natural world around us.
August 29, 2022
Welcome to Holden, Chelsea!
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.
Read moreAugust 26, 2022
Can I save my beech tree? And other beech care questions, answered
By David J. Burke, PhD, Vice President for Science and Conservation
If you live anywhere near northeastern Ohio, you may have noticed your beech trees are looking a bit ragged lately. Unfortunately, there are now not just one but two major pests — beech bark disease and beech leaf disease — that are bothering our region’s beeches.
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August 26, 2022
Why You Should Trim Your Beech Tree in September
By David J. Burke, PhD, Vice President for Science and Conservation
David Burke, Vice President for Science and Conservation, discusses Beech Tree health and how to properly trim to ensure the tree thrives.
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July 14, 2022
The Science Lab/ Kitchen Overlap
By Sharon Halkovics, Research Specialist
Years ago, I completed my undergraduate studies earning a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Health Science. I started down my career path assisting in a lab at a university. A couple of years later, I veered off course for a more hands-in-the-dirt experience and fell in love with small-scale farming. Farming led to working in restaurant kitchens then a culinary school, which eventually led to freelancing as a food stylist on large commercial accounts.
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July 8, 2022
A Morning in Working Woods
By Emma Dawson- Glass, Research Specialist
Have you ever wondered what the day-to-day of scientists looks like? Certainly, daily activities will vary greatly depending on what kind of scientist you are, what time of year it is, and where you work. For community ecologists in the Stuble Lab at the Holden Arboretum, the summer months means it’s time to get out into the natural area at Holden to collect data.
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June 24, 2022
A virtual tour of the natural areas used by the research department
By Emma Dawson-Glass, Research Specialist
Beyond its curated collections, the Holden Arboretum also retains many natural areas. In fact, most of the Holden Arboretum property is made up of natural areas, with 3,000 acres out of a total of 3,600 acres of the Arboretum property being made up of natural areas. These natural areas are a vital resource to researchers and allows us to study a wide breadth of Northeast Ohio habitats. In these natural areas we study everything from community assembly, to responses to restoration and management, to the impacts of global change disturbances such as climate change, invasive species, acid rain, and novel diseases. Below, we highlight a few of the many natural area field sites that scientists in the Research Department use for study.
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June 16, 2022
New Eastern Hemlock Conservation Work Kicks Off at Holden
By Rachel Kappler, Great Lakes Basin Forest Health Collaborative (GLB FHC) Coordinator
Researchers across the country are interested in learning more about forest pests that threaten our native tree species. Populations of eastern hemlock, found across Appalachia, New England, and the Great Lakes, are faced with two different insect pests, hemlock woolly adelgid and elongate hemlock scale, that have killed nearly 80 percent of hemlocks in some areas.
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June 9, 2022
A Virtual Tour of the Collections used by the Research Department
By Emma Dawson-Glass, Research Specialist
One of the greatest benefits of being a researcher at an arboretum is being able to access curated plant collections. Often, these collections have a well recorded history and can be sourced from all over the world. As such, researchers can ask many questions about plants, ranging from their evolutionary adaptions to their future responses to novel global change threats (like disease and climate change). Here, we highlight some of the collections at the Holden Arboretum that scientists in the Research Department use for study.
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June 3, 2022
2022 Holden Summer Intern Program
By Emma Dawson-Glass, Research Specialist
The HF&G’s Research, Community Forestry and Conservation teams are excited about the arrival of the 2022 cohort of interns. This year, HF&G leverages resources and opportunities across departments and campuses to allow our interns gain the finest in knowledge, experience, and skills for future career success.
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