Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

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Budke Receives NSF Collaboration Grant to Digitize Lichens and Bryophytes

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Across the planet’s terrestrial surface lives a layer of organisms that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Lichens and bryophytes are hosts to these cryptobiotic communities that play a critical role in stabilizing soil, preventing erosion, absorbing rainfall, and providing nutrients for the growing plants around them. This hidden life creates a critical miniature forest that serves as an important habitat for tiny animals and forms a “living skin” found throughout the world, from canyon deserts to polar icecaps.

Budke

Jessica Budke, director of the UT Herbarium (TENN) and her colleagues from 25 institutions across the United States received a grant from the National Science Foundation to image and digitize associated metadata for close to 1.2 million lichen and bryophyte specimens housed in their collections.

“Natural history collections are a physical record of our planet’s biodiversity across space and time,” said Budke, who is also an assistant professor in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “These specimens not only serve as records of the past, but they are a critical resource for our future. They help us to answer important questions surrounding invasive species, conservation biology, and help us to describe species that are new to science.”

The project, Building a Global Consortium of Bryophytes and Lichens: Keystones of Cryptobiotic Communities (GLOBAL), will enable researchers from around the world to access specimen metadata and photos of the plants. Budke is the lead principal investigator for the project.

“For the first time we will be taking photos not just of the label information, but also the physical organisms, which will enable researchers to digitally peek inside the packet to collect data from these specimens remotely,” Budke said. “The more data about these specimens that is available online enables researchers to expand the scope and impact of their research questions.”

plantsThe UT Herbarium is one of the largest plant natural history collections in the southeast with more than 640,000 specimens, including more than 180,000 mosses and lichens.

“Digitization is a game changer,” said Eric Tepe, curator of the Margaret H. Fulford Herbarium at the University of Cincinnati, one of the institutions involved in the project. “For centuries, natural history collections have been locked up in museums, available only to a handful of visitors. Large-scale digitization efforts, like this project, open the museum doors to the world, making specimen data and, in many cases, images freely available to everyone.”

Researchers with the project will partner with Zooniverse, a citizen science web portal, to develop an online platform for citizen scientists to make observations on character traits that can improve the information and fill in some of the gaps not covered by the scientific labeling process.

These integrated data will form a critical resource for evolutionary and ecological studies that researchers hope will lead to a deeper understanding of the role bryophytes and lichens play in carbon and nitrogen cycling, the evolution of biodiversity, and more.

In addition to collecting information about the specimens, undergraduate students at the partner institutions will have an opportunity to receive funding for professional training in image capture and processing, digitization, and collections management. Researchers will leverage local resources to promote underrepresented students in STEM fields and integrate a public outreach component to K-12 science classes and other science youth groups.

“This project represents a collaborative effort of 25 major research institutions,” Budke said. “It will push the field of organismal biology forward by leaps and bounds, enabling us to tackle large-scale biology questions that none of us could answer alone.”

Partner Institutions

Kwit, Graduate Students’ Research Featured in Science

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Charles KwitCharles Kwit, assistant professor of ecology, and his graduate students Chloe Lash and Chelsea Miller studied the microbial communities of seeds to discover what role ants play in seed dispersion. They looked at wild ginger, bloodroot, and twinleaf.

Read more about their research and the role ants play in forest ecology in a recent Science article, Don’t crust that ant – it could plant a wildflower. 

EEB Head’s statement on racism and police misconduct

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Dear EEB community,

The horrific issues of racism and police misconduct grabbing our attention lately are not news to the black members of our department, who experience it their entire lives. This racism, whether overt or unconscious, is present in our department, our field, and in our community.

As Dean Lee stated in her message to the college, systemic changes to fight racism must also happen at levels outside our college. But change must happen here in EEB, as well. This motivates me to ask what we can change to increase the safety and security of African-Americans in EEB and beyond. To make changes and move in the right direction, the department needs everyone’s blunt and honest input.  

We are a department motivated by science and facts – we seek to learn. Many in our department, including me, experience undue privilege and security relative to our African-American friends, neighbors, and co-workers, merely because we are white. We need each other to identify and change the racism in our society.

Please give us your ideas and feedback. You should have received this message, with a link to a survey, in your UT email. You can also contact me directly.

I also encourage you to investigate formal reporting for incidents occurring at UT:

Finally, we can all make strides and become effective allies. I encourage you to read the following article: A guide to how you can support marginalized communities.

We are one community and need to support each another.

Sincerely,
Susan Kalisz
Professor and Head
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Kalisz, Heberling, and Collaborators Receive ESA’s Mercer Award

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WildflowersSusan Kalisz, professor and head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and former post-doctoral fellow Mason Heberling, now assistant curator of botany at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, received the Ecological Society of America’s (ESA) George Mercer Award for their paper, “Phenological mismatch with trees reduces wildflower carbon budgets,” published in Ecology Letters in February 2019.

“The Mercer Award is one of ESA’s most prestigious awards,” Kalisz said. “We were all thrilled that our paper was chosen.”

Co-authors and co-awardees include Caitlyn MacKenzie from the University of Maine, Jason Fridley from Syracuse University, and Richard Primack from Boston University. 

Researchers leveraged the integration of historical records and contemporary experiments on many wildflower species to see how the overstory and understory responded differently to climate change and the unexpected consequences that followed. They used historical phenological observations, the oldest of which were made by Henry David Thoreau in the 1850s, alongside long-term temperature records, contemporary garden experiments from Kalisz’s NSF LTREB funding, and a simulation model.

“Our model projects a 10-48 percent reduction carbon gain and lower fitness for forest wildflowers in the coming century,” Kalisz said. “This happens because the overstory leaves emerge in response to warming spring temperatures, which limits the later emerging understory wildflowers’ photosynthesis, creating a phenological mismatch.”

The George Mercer Award is given for an outstanding ecological research paper published by a younger researcher, with the lead author 40 years of age or younger at the time of publication. The paper must have been published in 2018 or 2019 to be eligible for this year’s award, which will be presented in August 2020 at ESA’s (virtual) annual meeting along with a video depicting the work. Heberling and Mackenzie, both younger researchers, will share the monetary prize.

Read the paper online here.

–By Kelly Alley

McFarland Coauthors Paper on Spatially Separated Sexes and Extreme Sex Ratios in Hornwort

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Nothoceros aenigmaticus 3040 with labelKenneth McFarland, emeritus greenhouse manager and lecturer in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, recently co-authored a paper in Frontiers in Plant Science titled “Population Genomics and Phylogeography of a Clonal Bryophyte With Spatially Separated Sexes and Extreme Sex Ratios.”

Sexual reproduction plays an essential role in species’ survival and maintenance. Clonality and other forms of asexual reproduction, however, also exist, especially in plants.

In their study, researchers focused on the southern Appalachian clonal hornwort, Nothoceros aenigmaticus, which grows on rocks near or submerged in streams in watersheds of the Tennessee and Alabama Rivers. This hornwort is a good example of a plant that reproduces asexually and clonally as its male plants seem to produce non-functional sperm cells. It is distributed in southern Appalachia, Mexico, and in “alpine” regions of tropical South America.

“Early bryophyte taxonomists noted the existence of this plant in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, but hesitated naming it for lack of any sexual reproductive structures that would define it as a liverwort or hornwort,” McFarland said. “After these sexual reproduction structures were discovered, it was finally named and classified as a hornwort. This was not the end of the story. The next surprising discovery was that the species had a limited distribution and the two sexes were isolated from each other. “

Unlike elsewhere in its range, male and female plants in the US are geographically separated by ca. 30 km across rivers and mountains, as they grow on rocks in different watersheds of the Tennessee and Alabama Rivers.

“Whether male and female populations were geographically isolated to the extent that migration, and sporadic sexual reproduction was completely absent, and hence whether these populations relied always exclusively on asexual propagation was unknown,” McFarland said. “Resolving this uncertainty is critical to assess the vulnerability of these populations to environmental change.”

To confirm the total reproductive isolation, reconstruct its origin, and assess the mode of reproduction of N. aenigmaticus in southern Appalachia, researchers analyzed genetic data of more than 250 individuals of the species. Nothoceros aenigmaticus likely immigrated to the US from sexual Mexican ancestors about 600–800,000 years ago. The genomic data confirmed the absolute reproductive isolation between sexes and the absolute genetic isolation among southern Appalachian populations.

“The southern Appalachian drainage system is thought to have been remodeled by geological processes during the Pleistocene glaciations, which could have mixed genotypes from contiguous watersheds,” McFarland said.

Populations from contiguous watersheds share clones, but individuals lack mixed genetic traits, consistent with the lack of sexual reproduction, as is their overall reduced genetic diversity. This low extant genetic diversity and the extreme sex segregation point out the high vulnerability of N. aenigmaticus to extinction in southern Appalachia under major alteration of the habitats.

“Even though there are still unanswered questions, with the use of DNA technology, this publication has greatly expanded our understanding of the complex nature of N. aenigmaticus,” McFarland said.

Read the full article online here.

Kalisz Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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susan kaliszSusan Kalisz, the College of Arts and Sciences Excellence Professor and head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, is a newly elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences class of 2020.

“I am honored to join such a distinguished group of scholars and leaders in the arts and sciences,” Kalisz said. “It’s still a bit of a shock, but a wonderful piece of good news during the uncertain time we are all experiencing.”

The Academy announced its newest members April 23, 2020, with the election of 276 artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, non-profit, and private sectors.

“The members of the class of 2020 have excelled in laboratories and lecture halls, they have amazed on concert stages and in surgical suites, and they have led in board rooms and courtrooms,” said Academy President David W. Oxtoby. “With today’s election announcement, these new members are united by a place in history and by an opportunity to shape the future through the Academy’s work to advance the public good.”

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good.

Two hundred and forty years later, the Academy continues to dedicate itself to recognizing excellence and relying on expertise – both of which seem more important than ever.

“We congratulate these incoming members of the Academy for excelling in a broad array of fields; we want to celebrate them and learn from them,” said Nancy C. Andrews, Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Academy. “When Academy members come together, bringing their expertise and insights to our work, they help develop new insights and potential solutions for some of the most complex challenges we face.”

The Academy’s projects and publications are focused on the arts and humanities, democracy and justice, education, global affairs, and science.

Current Academy members represent today’s innovative thinkers in every field and profession, including more than 250 Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners.

The new members join the company of Academy members elected before them, including Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton in the eighteenth century; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Maria Mitchell in the nineteenth; Robert Frost, Martha Graham, Margaret Mead, Milton Friedman, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the twentieth; and – in the past two decades – Antonin Scalia, Michael Bloomberg, John Lithgow, Judy Woodruff, and Bryan Stevenson.

International Honorary Members include Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Laurence Olivier, Mary Leakey, John Maynard Keynes, Akira Kurosawa, and Nelson Mandela.

The complete class of 2020 is listed here.

Gavrilets Receives Army Research Grants

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Sergey Gavrilets, a distinguished professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has received more than $1.1 million in grants from the Army Research Office for study into societal resilience using evolutionary models and theories of revolution.

Gavrilet’s research is funded by the Department of Defense’s Minerva Program, which is dedicated to predicting future socio-political crises in the world and societies’ resilience to various political, economic, environmental, and health-related shocks.

“I work with mathematical models to develop a theory that hopefully will be useful to predict or identify certain problems or uncover gaps in our knowledge,” Gavrilets said. “I used to work a lot in biology and biological evolution, but lately I’ve shifted towards social and cultural evolution and behavior.”  

By using new and improved modeling tools, analysts will be able to assess political stability risks, improving predictions and explanations for societal unrest.

“The reason why we want to do this is because life is getting pretty complicated, especially over the last 10 to 20 years,” he said. “Conflicts are popping up in different places and usually come completely unexpected. Naturally, everyone wants to understand them better and hopefully predict them.”

Gavrilet’s research will also yield theoretical and modeling approaches with applications in fundamental sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology.

–By Kelly Alley

The University of Tennessee wishes to acknowledge Lisa Troyer at the Army Research Office for supporting these projects.

Kivlin Coauthors Article on Fungal Aerobiota

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Stephanie KivlinStephanie Kivlin, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, coauthored a paper titled “Fungal aerobiota are not affected by time nor environment over a 13-y time series at the Mauna Loa Observatory,” published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers used 13 years of collected air samples from Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii Island to determine if local or global environmental factors influence fungi composition.

“One of the big questions in microbial ecology is trying to figure out how microbes disperse around the world and if they can disperse everywhere,” Kivlin said.

Kivlin and other researchers from the University of Hawaii initially genetically sequenced fungal spores and studied their traits, such as size and shape, before discovering the role wind patterns play in fungal spore dispersal.

“What we found was that we could trace back wind patterns to try to understand where the wind was coming from that deposited the fungal spores on the filters,” Kivlin said. “We saw some that were coming from Asia, bringing fungi that are never found in Hawaii. The wind patterns are really what’s blowing the fungi around.”

The researchers also discovered that some airborne fungal spores are still viable after traveling long distances.

“Because we found a couple of fungi that were dispersing all the way across the Pacific Ocean, we need to really consider how far fungi can go and what that means for dispersal of new pathogens into new areas,” Kivlin said. “We need to have better theory about how often those dispersal events occur, which fungi are coming, and if they are beneficial or harmful.”

Coauthors on the paper include Laura Tipton, Anthony Amend, and Nicole Hyson from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Erin Datlof from the University of Hawaii at Hilo, Geoffrey Zahn from Utah Valley University, and Patrick Sheridan from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Division.

By Kelly Alley

In Memory of Ed Clebesch

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Ed ClebeschAs snow blanketed the Smokies, Edward (Ed) Ernst Cooper Clebsch (June 6, 1929 – December 14, 2019) passed away in peace surrounded by his family.

He was born in Clarksville, Tennessee, to Julia (Wilee) and Alfred Bernhard Clebsch, an immigrant from Bremen, Germany. Edward Clebsch, professor emeritus, spent most of his life living in Tennessee: Clarksville, Knoxville, Greenback, Norris, and Oak Ridge.

His father instilled in him a deep love of the natural world and music. Memories of his fun-loving mother’s cooking inspired him to become a consummate bread baker. Ed was always happy to share a loaf with friends.

He was a Clarksville High School graduate (1947), then played piccolo and flute in the Army band during the Korean War (1951-1952).

At 14, Ed knew he wanted to be a botanist. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in botany at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His received his PhD from Duke University with a dissertation on Tristetum spicatum in far northern Alaska.

Ed joined UT as a botany professor in 1963 and played a leadership role in developing the UT program in ecological sciences. His research took him to many places, including Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

As a gifted professor and lifelong ponderer of the wonders of the world, Ed influenced many lives: his love of plants, innate understanding of ecology, outdoor skills, and great sense of humor motivated many students to pursue careers in the natural sciences. He advised 32 master’s students and 17 doctoral students, as well as postdoctoral fellows, in the ecology of tundra, catfish, earthworms, biogeochemistry, biogeography, and plant populations.

He co-wrote and supervised more than 100 scientific publications (40 as primary author), theses, and dissertations. Participating and belonging to more than 60 organizations and committees during his 90 years, he was instrumental in the creation of many lasting endeavors, including the Spring Wildflower Pilgrimage, the UT Arboretum, Smoky Mountains Field School, and Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning.

Ed was sought after as a presenter and field trip leader outside of academia. He received the Community Outreach Service Award in the College of Liberal Arts of the University of Tennessee in 1990 for his public service.

On the river, up a mountain, and around the campfire, Ed transferred his curiosity and excitement to his students, earning him the Meritorious Teaching Award of the Association of Southeastern Biologists in 1998. Other career awards included the Tom Dodd, Jr. Native Plantsman Award in 2002 for conservation and horticulture of native plants.

Being a lifelong voracious reader, he belonged to a book club in Oak Ridge known for its lively discussions, good food, and deep friendships.

Edward E. C. Clebsch will be missed and has left a legacy of love and laughter. He leaves three children, Liese Clebsch Dean (Idaho), Julia Clebsch (West Virginia), Hans Clebsch (Ohio), their spouses, and his two grandchildren, Luis C. Clebsch and Cooper D. Dean. He was preceded in death by his two older brothers Alfred and William Clebsch.

Following in the footsteps of his passions, his daughters worked for the US Forest Service and the National Park Service, and his son plays French Horn with the Cleveland Orchestra.

There will be no memorial service, but following Ed’s wishes, a celebration of his life is in the planning.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made in his memory to Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning, TCWP, P. O. Box 6873, Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37830.

Submitted by Julia C. Clebsch, Liese Dean, and Hans Clebsch