Research
Department News
January 20, 2022
Get to know a scientist: Samuel Harbol
This week we learn more about Samuel Harbol, this year’s Norweb Fellow working in Dr. Juliana Medeiros’ lab. This one-year research fellowship is named in honor of R. Henry Norweb Jr., the first executive director of Holden Arboretum and grandson of Holden’s founder Albert Fairchild Holden.
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January 14, 2022
Mushroom Identification: Results from the Holden Forests & Gardens Mushroom Month Foray!
By Claudia Victoroff, MS, Graduate Student
Relative to plants and animals, identifying fungi presents unique challenges. First, the kingdom fungi is extremely species rich. While nearly 100,000 species of fungi have been discovered by science, estimates of the total number of existing species range up to 5.1 million!
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December 16, 2021
Get to know a scientist: Alexa Wagner
By Emma Dawson-Glass, Research Specialist
Scientists as a demographic are often viewed as a mythic group—the keepers of knowledge, uniquely capable of understanding complex systems, destined to their career choice from birth. However, this line of reasoning often makes the idea of becoming a scientist seem unattainable. Here in Holden’s Research Department, my fellow scientists and I often marvel at this perception. Usually, rather than talking about new groundbreaking scientific discoveries, most of our conversations revolve around the things we don’t know, all the facts we’ve forgotten, and the things we’ve messed up. These challenges do not make us feel like less capable scientists—rather, we view them as essential parts of the process.
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December 10, 2021
Science on Fridays with Holden: Roadmaps to building equitable and inclusive research experiences in STEM
By Juliana S. Medeiros, PhD, Plant Biologist
What can we do to create more equitable and inclusive STEM educational systems? This year, the Scientist Lecture Series is featuring speakers that have successfully run boots-on-the-ground institutional diversity initiatives. These leaders have strong records of advocacy and are employing innovative ideas to build anti-racist/anti-sexist programs, truly they are changing the system in support of a more diverse STEM workforce.
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December 2, 2021
Healthy Soils have a Healthy Dose of Decomposition: Celebrating World Soil Day
By Sarah Kyker, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Associate
December 5th marks World Soil Day. World Soil Day began in 2014, initiated by the United Nations, to focus attention on the importance of soil health. But what exactly is healthy soil? The soil ecology lab at Holden Forests & Gardens asks this question each and every day.
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November 12, 2021
Science on Fridays: Roadmaps to building equitable & inclusive research experiences in STEM
What can we do to create more equitable and inclusive STEM educational systems? This year, the Scientist Lecture Series will feature speakers that have successfully run boots-on-the-ground institutional diversity initiatives. These leaders have strong records of advocacy and are employing innovative ideas to build anti-racist/anti-sexist programs, truly they are changing the system in support of a more diverse STEM workforce.
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October 29, 2021
At Holden, Our Resilient Forests Are Also Laboratories
By Katie Stuble, PhD, Scientist
At Holden Forests & Gardens, we’re pretty excited about trees. And, we’ve got a lot of them! In addition to the thousands of trees in our gardens and collections, the arboretum campus is also home to several thousand acres of forest. These forests range from remnant old growth stands, to young forests recovering following decades of agriculture. They provide both critical habitat as well as outdoor living laboratories in which we conduct research to better understand the natural world.
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October 22, 2021
Great scientists are made, not born
By Juliana S. Medeiros, PhD, Plant Biologist
We’ve all heard the story; a famous scientist is asked how they got interested in their subject area and they say something like “I’ve always loved sea otters and wanted to be a marine biologist ever since I was a little boy”. This common storyline is part of why scientific skills are viewed as inherent, people either ARE scientists, or they ARE NOT.
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October 1, 2021
Beech Leaf Disease and Forest Fungi: Healthy trees support healthy fungal communities
By Claudia Victoroff, MS, Graduate Student
Arboreta play an active role in studying a wide range of tree diseases and the pathogens and parasites that cause them. Holden is no exception. Work from our arboretum and in collaboration with a number of partners, especially the USDA Forest Service, has expanded knowledge on several tree diseases caused by parasites, including the hemlock woolly adelgid and the emerald ash borer.
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September 24, 2021
Celebrating National Mushroom Month with a Book Review and a Recipe too!
By Claudia Bashian-Victoroff, Jessica Miller, Sarah Kyker, and David Burke
As September winds down, we are taking one more week to celebrate fungi during National Mushroom Month! Read more about the importance of mushrooms as well as a book review from Claudia Bashian-Victoroff. Celebrate the beginning of fall with one more delicious recipe to satisfy your mushroom cravings.
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September 17, 2021
National Mushroom Month: Sharing Some Science & a Recipe, Too!
By Claudia Bashian-Victoroff, MS, Graduate Student, Sarah Kyker, Postdoctoral Research Associate, and David Burke, VP, Science & Conservation
We continue to celebrate September as National Mushroom Month at HF&G! Today we want to tell you about our favorite fungal group: mycorrhizal fungi! While we certainly love all fungi, a large portion of the research in HF&G’s Soil Ecology lab focuses on the plant mutualists known as mycorrhizal fungi.
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September 10, 2021
Science on Friday: Soil, Mushrooms & a Recipe, Too!
By Claudia Victoroff, MS, Graduate Student
We continue to celebrate September: National Mushroom Month. Mushrooms are amazing (and delicious) and definitely deserve a month of focus and celebration. Today we’ll take a look at how soil and mushrooms interact and support each other.
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September 8, 2021
Breaking News: Pollinators contribute to flowering plant diversity
Holden Forests & Gardens (HF&G) Scientist Na Wei, Ph.D., and her collaborators from the University of Pittsburgh and East Tennessee State University discovered how pollinators may contribute to the maintenance of flowering plant diversity. This study that accelerates our understanding of biodiversity conservation is now published in the journal Nature.
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September 3, 2021
Science on Friday – A Book About Mushrooms & a Recipe
By Claudia Victoroff, MS, Graduate Student
With summer turning into autumn, September is a great time of year to see mushrooms in the forest. Mushrooms are a type of sporocarp, or the fruiting body of fungi, and the month of September offers just the right temperature and soil moisture for fungi to fruit. We love the beauty of the forest floor filled with sporocarps during September; it’s a great time of year for a mushroom foray! “What is a mushroom foray?” you might ask. It is an organized hike where a group of people head into the forest and look for mushrooms. Sometimes the group is organized to hunt for edible mushrooms; other times it is for a scientific study; and sometimes it is just to enjoy the beauty of the mushrooms! You can join us for a foray at Holden Arboretum on September 18th! The purpose of our foray will be to learn about Ohio’s native mushrooms and how to identify them and will be led by Claudia Bashian-Victoroff (register here). We hope you can join us for a fun morning!
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September 1, 2021
September is National Mushroom Month
By Sabrina Kozsey, Gardener
Happy National Mushroom Month!
September is one of our favorite months at Holden Forests & Gardens. 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 forest health and the natural world around us. We have classes for you to take devoted to mushrooms and we’ll be posting on our blog all month long too.
We launch the month with some incredible photographs of mushrooms found at the botanical garden taken by gardener Sabrina Kozey.
Here we go!
Prior to being a Gardener at the Cleveland Botanical Garden, I was lucky enough to work in natural areas that did not have public access. I found some fascinating fungi that I had never seen before. It sparked an interest in fungi and mushrooms and now wherever I go in nature I always keep my eyes peeled for a marvelous mushroom to photograph. Even though you can find some interesting ones in areas less travelled, there are also some pretty awesome ones where you least expect them along popular trails. I know fungi Is not the first thing on your mind when visiting a botanical garden, but you can often find some wonderful ones around here. I am brand new to mushroom identification, which I have discovered can often be quite difficult. So, I am not going to try and identify all these mushrooms I have found (hopefully in the future I can) but here are some of the mushrooms I have seen around the Cleveland Botanical Garden, Enjoy!
August 23, 2021
What is in a Plant Physiologist’s Toolkit?: Measuring Photosynthesis
By Sharon Danielson, MS, Doctoral Graduate Student
If you are a plant lover, chances are you often find yourself thinking about photosynthesis in some way. You may move a house plant to a bright window so that it can use energy from light to fix carbon from the atmosphere and use that carbon to build tissues as it grows. Or, perhaps you want your vegetable garden to give you delicious tomatoes, so you choose the best conditions to maximize fruit production.
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August 16, 2021
Researchers, Horticulturists, and Volunteers Team Up to Leverage Long-Term Pollinator Data
Pollinators are the friends of plants and people. Most flowering plants (~80%) are animal pollinated. Sadly, there is a global trend in pollinator declines, especially under the changing climates. To conserve pollinators, Holden Forests & Gardens has been monitoring pollinators at the arboretum since 2015.
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August 13, 2021
Climate Change and Earlier Springs – How Are Plants Responding Around the World?
By Katie Stuble, PhD, Scientist
Climate Change and Earlier Springs – How Are Plants Responding Around the World?
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August 10, 2021
Katie Stuble is Lead Author on a Paper in BioScience
By Katie Stuble, PhD, Scientist
Holden scientist and research chair, Katie Stuble, has been exploring ways in which we can harness the power in biological data collected over time and across many sites to understand how climate change is impacting our natural world. A new paper stemming from this work has just been published in the scientific journal BioScience.
Stuble KL, S Des Roches, A Ambrose, KC Brown, H Cooper, T Hilton, B Sinervo, LR Fox (2021) Regional networks of biological field stations to study climate change. BioScience 71(8): 874-882.
August 6, 2021
Claudia’s Travel Blog: A Research Excursion through Armenia
By Claudia Victoroff, MS, Graduate Student
When you think of the country Armenia, what comes to mind? Maybe you know of a few famous Armenians, such as Cher or the Kardashians. More importantly, you may know that President Biden recently became the first U.S. president to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, which began in 1915. What you might not know is that Armenia is an ancient and yet contemporary civilization situated within a biodiversity hotspot, the Caucasus Mountain range. The region is home to more than 6000 species of plants, 153 species of mammals and 400 species of birds, some of which are endemic (or exclusive) to Armenia. Armenia is home to large stretches of undisturbed primary forests and the Armenian people have a long history of land stewardship, and of intimate connection with the unique and beautiful landscape.
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August 6, 2021
Holden Researchers Present at ESA
Holden researchers have spent this week attending one of the world’s largest gatherings of ecologists: the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. This year, four Holden researchers are presenting their work into urban trees, forest management, and more.
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July 23, 2021
The Name Game
By Connor Ryan, Rhododendron Collections Manager
Much of the research we have historically done at the HF&G’s David G. Leach Research Station is directly focused on new plant development. We are trying to breed the next generation of rhododendrons for the gardening public. The scientific, horticultural, and business aspects of plant introduction could be written about ad nauseam, but today, I would like to discuss something at the intersection of all three – naming.
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July 16, 2021
Holden Students Reach for the Moon, Land Among the Stars
By Juliana Medeiros , Plant Biologist
One of the most important aspects of our work in the HF&G research department is mentoring students in independent research projects. Our research students include undergraduates and graduate students who come to us from the greater Cleveland area and beyond, to work on projects addressing important questions in ecology and evolutionary biology.
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July 9, 2021
Annual SEARCH Symposium Held Virtually
Interns from the Research and Conservation departments presented their summer projects at the annual SEARCH symposium. This year, SEARCH was held virtually on July 9th and included online posters that are still available for viewing at Make:Projects.
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