Seasonal Senescence

"Winter!  Thou art e'er the grand finale,

Bringing death to all the fickle folly,

Of thy fair, but transient sisters.

List their requiem, the wind-wailed whispers.

All browned now and withered lie the leaves,

Gone are the circling swallows from the eaves;

The cheery summer scenes and sounds are past,

Winter reigneth supreme and rides the blast."

-"Winter" from Prairie Poems and Others by F.D. Dibble

Laramie's scene now involves snow and chilly breezes, and the Berry Prairie shows that well.  Now under an inch of snow, the plants are hunkering down for winter.  Following their cues, the Berry Prairie blog writers will take their senescence now too, until the new leaves pop up in spring.

Winter Projects

A couple of prairie-related projects we'll be working on this winter:

1. Weather: You'll see in the photo below that we have installed a weather station on the green roof, which monitors temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speeds, precipitation, dew point, and more.  

That information is routed to a receiver inside the building, which retains all of that data and allows the user (ahem, the people in the Berry Center) to download the information to a computer where we can analyze and share the trends and current conditions.  

2.  Propagation: Karen Panter (you remember her, right?  She's a UW faculty member who propagated a number of the commercially unavailable plants that we installed in the prairie) will be raising a number of seedlings again this winter.  She's focusing on those that didn't grow well last winter/spring, and those that weren't quite ready to be installed this summer. 

The green roof is still open for interested folks to visit, though it's not quite as interesting with most of the plants covered up with snow.  

Have a great winter, see you in the spring!

Written by Brenna Wanous, Berry Center

Biodiversity Scavenger Hunt

If you're in Laramie and are looking for a fun, family activity today and this weekend, check out the Berry Center's UW Biodiversity Scavenger Hunt!  There are nine questions and clues that will lead you all over the main part of campus where you'll discover some surprising and fascinating biodiversity tidbits.  

How to Scavenge: 

To join in, simply download the scavenger hunt clue sheet.

Wander around campus today (you need to visit some of the locales during business hours today - see the clue sheet for more information) and tomorrow to find the answers.

Once you've completed as many questions as you can, submit your answers online.

The Prizes:

The three individuals or groups (you can work in groups of no more than three people) with the most correct answers will win a ticket per person to one of the following locations (winner chooses):

1. Denver Zoo (rawr!)
2. Denver Museum of Nature and Science (best museum ever!)
3. Denver Botanic Gardens (purdy!)

Email bwanous@uwyo.edu or call 307-766-6240 or stop in Berry Center 231 with any questions.

Written by Brenna Wanous, Berry Center

Snow Falling on Sedums

October 7 marked Laramie's first day of winter.  Not according to the calendar of course, but according to the weather.  And while it was a surprise to wake up on Saturday morning to three inches of snow, I'm sure the plants in the Berry Prairie were even more confused.  (Or maybe not... do they know more than we do?  Could they sense the snow?  Watch the next episode of the Twilight Zone to find out...)

The Berry Prairie was covered with snow on Monday morning.

But in any case, the snow on the Berry Prairie exemplifies one of the questions we have about how this green roof will over winter.  See the photograph above.  There is at least an inch of snow covering those plants, which is 1) maybe good for the plants (insulation for the winter, water supply, erosion protection, etc.), and 2) strange, considering most of the snow elsewhere had melted by Monday morning.

The roof over the Vertebrate Collection extends precisely to that line of snow-no snow boundary.
Monday, October 10

As you see in the photo above, the snow that is above the Vertebrate Collection, including the Berry Prairie and the patio directly south of it, hadn't melted even though snow on the rest of the true ground had. 

Is that a good or bad thing?  How will it influence plant survival over the winter?  Will there be other effects from the roof, light heating from below that causes the plants to not freeze over the winter?

What are your guesses?  Any thoughts on how snow piling and this roof-top environment will fare?

By now, much of the snow is turned to usable precipitation for the plants.  But that was just the first of many snowfalls this winter.  Stay tuned!

Most of the snow has melted by Tuesday morning.

Written by Brenna Wanous, Berry Center

Nomenclatural Frustration

Agropyron molle, Agropyron smithii, Agropyron smithii var. molle, Agropyron smithii var. palmeri, Elymus smithii, Elytrigia smithii, Elytrigia smithii var. mollis and Pascopyrum smithii are all names for western wheatgrass. Is this a mess, or what? We’ve all heard the argument that scientific names are preferable to common names because they are unambiguous and understood all around the world, but clearly this is not always true.

Of course, I’ve deliberately chosen an exceptionally messy example, but gardeners and botanists have all experience an inconvenient name change in a favorite plant. (Should pasque flower be Anemone or Pulsatilla? Is pincushion cactus Coryphantha or Escobaria?) Why can’t scientists make up their minds and settle on a single name? The answer: that is not the nature of science.

Carl Linnaeus, the father of
scientific nomenclature

Taxonomists, like all good scientists, adjust their hypotheses and conclusions when new evidence becomes available, and in the last decades a wealth of new evidence has become available. Since the time of Linnaeus (1707-1778), characteristics of the sex organs of flowers have been the most important features used in taxonomy, so that plants with similar flowers were placed into the same group. Linnaeus’s goal of organization, however, is not the goal of contemporary taxonomists. Now, we strive to organize plants into “natural groups,” groups that reflect common ancestry, not morphological similarity (though that can be a valuable clue).

In the last 30 years, many mysteries of molecular evolution have been at least partially resolved. Complex algorithms and DNA sequencing have made it possible to propose new taxonomic categories that more closely reflect our understanding of evolutionary patterns of both genotypes and phenotypes, and this has led to the rearrangement of groups and consequent necessary name changes. These changes have occurred at all taxonomic levels, from phylum down to subspecies, but are most noticeable when genus or species names are changed. Don’t be annoyed—think of it as progress and be glad that some botanist likes your favorite plants enough to work on them. Besides, since taxonomists don’t all agree on which algorithm is best, or on which DNA sequence most reliably represents evolution of the group, and new algorithms and genes are proposed, we can expect the changes to keep on happening.

Western wheatgrass

So, which name for western wheat grass is best? That depends on just which characteristic you think is most important in discriminating among species in the complex group that includes western wheat grass. In this case, the best name might just be the common one—we all agree on that one.

Written by Dorothy Tuthill—who used to be known by a different name