{"id":12308,"date":"2015-01-12T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2015-01-12T17:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/creative.clemson.edu\/clemsonworld\/?p=12308"},"modified":"2015-01-12T12:00:02","modified_gmt":"2015-01-12T17:00:02","slug":"rooted-botanist-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/rooted-botanist-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Rooted: A Botanist in Her World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Botanist, teacher, curator, scholar \u2014 Dixie Damrel encourages her students to experience the green world around them.<\/em><\/h2>\n

One step off the asphalt parking lot, Dixie Damrel enters another world.
\nIt is a world of individuals, families, clans and communities. Damrel knows the names of thousands of the inhabitants, their Latin names and their familiar ones. She knows about their sex lives and their histories. And she is delighted to share what she knows.
\nLast semes\"Botanist-Dixieter, I tagged along on one of the weekly field trips to the world she loves. The Whitewater River access is inside the Duke Power Bad Creek property above Lake Jocassee. The students hardly had time to stretch from the van ride before Damrel got going. \u201cToday, we\u2019re going to visit four communities \u2014 early successional, pine-oak heath, rocky stream bed and an original acidic cove forest,\u201d says Damrel. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a lot to see.\u201d
\nDixie Damrel is a botanist, teacher, curator of the Clemson University Herbarium and newly minted Fulbright Scholar. A walk in the woods with Damrel is no ramble. You have to keep up physically and intellectually.
\n[pullquote]Botany is too important not to pay attention. No matter how you like your ribeye cooked, it started out as grass.[\/pullquote] Oxygen and energy, food and fuel, the green world is the primary production engine of the planet.
\n\u201cLook at this,\u201d Damrel instructs, bending a shrub branch for inspection. \u201cLook at the leaves. What do you see?\u201d The students lean in. Some pull another branch closer to see. \u201cWhat\u2019s different about these leaves? Look at the top. Now look at the underside. What\u2019s different?\u201d
\nA student takes a shot: \u201cThey\u2019re gray.\u201d
\n\u201cYes, they\u2019re silvery gray!\u201d Damrel responds. \u201cThis is Elaeagnus umbellata \u2014 silverberry \u2014 a deciduous shrub with green leaves above and silvery ones below.\u201d
\nThe students know not to move yet. There\u2019s more \u2014 there\u2019s always more \u2014 and sometimes a story.
\n\u201cLook at the silver side of the leaves. Feel them. What\u2019s different?\u201d
\nNo one offers, and Damrel doesn\u2019t have time to wait them out. There are about three miles to cover, and dark clouds are gathering off in the distance over the lake.
\n\u201cThe leaves have scales. Now look at the berries. What do you see? Feel them.\u201d
\nSome of the students see where this is going. \u201cThe skin is rough, like the leaves.\u201d
\n\u201cYes! The berries have scales, too,\u201d says Damrel, picking one of the ripe, red, pea-size berries. \u201cYou can taste them if you want.\u201d
\nDamrel doesn\u2019t allow eating unless she has tried the fruit on the preview trip she takes to scope out an area. Later, we will come to bear huckleberry, which has edible fruit, but she had not tried it. \u201cIt scared me,\u201d she said.
\nBut the silverberry is ok. Damrel pops one into her mouth. \u201cHow does it taste?\u201d Sweetly tart is the verdict.
\n\u201cBirds like the fruit and so do bears, and that helps the silverberry reproduce. The birds eat the berry, and the seed is eliminated along with bird poop, which acts as a coating of fertilizer when there\u2019s the right place to grow.\u201d
\nAnd grow it does, says Damrel. \u201cIt\u2019s an invasive species brought to the U.S. to use as a wind break and erosion control.\u201d<\/p>\n

BEYOND SEEING FORESTS AS WALLS OF GREEN<\/h3>\n

\"Botanist2\"<\/a>I hear \u201clook, look, look\u201d over and over again, as Damrel imprints her legacy of \u201csee for yourself and learn by looking\u201d on her students. We stop at a sawtooth oak. It\u2019s another invasive species, where good intentions to provide wildlife food were undone by unintentional consequences. Deer and other browsers will only eat the bitter acorns if no other food is available. No one checked with the animals.
\nThere are quick stops at the sourwood \u2014 \u201cit makes the best honey in the world,\u201d Dixie declares. We admire the goldenrod flowers. \u201cWhat kind of flowers are they?\u201d Composite. Goldenrod gets a bad rap, says Damrel. It doesn\u2019t cause hay fever because its pollen is too heavy and sticky to be windborne. Ragweed is the culprit.
\nThen, dog fennel sets off a story.
\n\u201cDog fennel is from the genus Eupatorium, part of the aster family. There was a king with a similar name. The king decided to eat small amounts of poison to build up tolerance to poison. He was an enemy of the Romans, and when they advanced on him, he attempted to poison himself, but it wouldn\u2019t work. So finally he had to ask his friends to stab him, and they did.\u201d
\nThe king\u2019s name was Eupator Dionysias, another name for Mithridates VI of Pontius, for whom the plant was named.
\nDamrel\u2019s students listen, and I wonder what they think of all this. Is it simply a case of politely listening to a slightly eccentric elder?
\n\u201cI love this class,\u201d says Dan Blanchard, horticulture major. Every student I asked used the words \u201cpassionate\u201d and \u201csmart\u201d to describe this spare, spry woman in worn jeans who wears her honey-brown hair in long braids that tangle in the cord holding her \u201cnerd eye\u201d \u2014 a magnifying loupe.\u00a0[pullquote]She is the kind of teacher you remember for life and hope your kids find.[\/pullquote]
\n\"Botanist-Dixie<\/a>Thunder cuts the field trip short. We don\u2019t make it to the old trees, survivors of European pioneers, colonials, settlers and capitalists. We quick-step back to the parking lot. Plant identification and plant lore have filled the afternoon. Rattlesnake orchids have astonishing sex lives involving moths. Buffalo nut is a member of the sandalwood family \u2014 \u201cYou\u2019ve smelled sandalwood incense if you\u2019ve ever been in a head shop\u201d (students snicker). Yellowroot lives by streams, but it keeps from being washed away and stabilizes the banks because it is anchored in place by rhizomes, and its flexible stems bend but don\u2019t break during flooding.
\nOver the course of the semester, students will learn and be quizzed about the names and key characteristics of 130 plants. \u201cIf I can get them to look more closely, beyond seeing forests as walls of green and groundcovers as carpets of green, they will see the world differently and ask questions,\u201d says Damrel.<\/p>\n

MARKERS OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE<\/h3>\n

Damrel reckons she can identify and name 2,000 plants. \u201cBut I can\u2019t remember my phone number,\u201d she laughs. A couple of thousand seem like a lot of plants. How many plants are there in the world?
\nIt should be a Google-able answer. Botanists have been collecting, naming and studying plants for centuries, but all they have is a best guess.
\n\"Botanist7\"Their estimates range from 200,000 to 400,000, maybe more. Oddly, there are a lot more plant names than plant species. The problem is synonomy. Botanists think they have found a new species and name it, but many of these are synonyms \u2014 same plant named by someone else.
\nOne international project has compiled the Plant List that contains 298,900 documented species, 477,601 synonyms and 263,925 still-to-be vetted names.
\nHow do botanists figure out what they have collected? Often, it\u2019s not enough to see a photo and read the description. Seeing the plant in person makes a difference between \u201clooks a lot like\u201d and certainty. But botanists cannot always travel to the corners of the world to see similar species; nor can they travel back in time if a species is extinct. Yet, there is a way for them to see beyond their range in space and time. There are herbaria.
\nAn herbarium is a research archive of expertly dried and mounted plant specimens that identify and document a particular plant collected by botanists, students \u2014 anyone with an interest in plants \u2014 in a particular place and time. The specimens are arranged in special cabinets so that they can be removed and consulted by researchers. The largest herbaria have more-than-million-specimen collections started in the 1700s.
\nThere are about 100,000 specimens in the Clemson herbarium housed in the Bob and Betsy Campbell Museum of Natural History. The oldest specimen dates to the 1860s and was collected by Henry William Ravenel, a South Carolina planter and botanist, who lived from 1814 to 1887.
\nLooking and comparing, researchers look for changes in biodiversity and plants coping with stresses. Drought and heat linked to climate change can trigger plants to adapt, giving rise to new species. Other times, plants disappear because of land-use change or from invasive plant populations crowding out the natives.<\/p>\n

FROM DRAWERS AND SHELVES TO AN ONLINE DATABASE<\/h3>\n

Research demands are leading to new ways of looking at plants. High-definition digital images and the Internet provide extraordinary detail and accessibility for research. Clemson is part of the digitization initiative.
\nThe herba\"Botanist8\"rium is set to launch a four-year project to make digital images of its collection. The herbarium is included in a National Science Foundation grant that aims to build a digital inventory highlighting the Southeastern United States.\u00a0Clemson\u2019s specimen records will be part of a three-million plant dataset from 107 herbaria in 13 Southeastern states that will enable large-scale research in a region\u00a0that has been a biodiversity\u00a0hot spot for 100 million years, say botanists.\u00a0The digital database will help researchers examine the effects of climate change, identify vulnerable species and help conserve regional biodiversity.
\nClemson joins the University of South Carolina\u2019s A.C. Moore Herbarium to coordinate digitizing plant collections statewide. Seven other colleges and universities are participating, including: Converse, Francis Marion, Furman, Newberry, Winthrop, USC Salkehatchie and USC Upstate.\u00a0\u201cI\u2019m very proud that South Carolina has one of the largest numbers of herbaria participating of any state in the Southeast,\u201d says Damrel.
\nThe digitization will make collections at Clemson and at other institutions accessible via the Internet. The digitized data will eventually be publicly available through the iDigBio (Integrated Digitized Biocollections) specimen portal.
\n\u201cThere are specimens that have been around for 100-200 years, but they are in a drawer or on a shelf somewhere, and it\u2019s hard to know where everything is and how to get the data you need,\u201d iDigBio Director Larry Page said.\u00a0[pullquote]\u201cIf it\u2019s online, you can touch a button and find in seconds what might have taken you a lifetime to know was there.\u201d[\/pullquote]
\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div><\/p>\n

FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE<\/h3>\n

The work will start this summer, after Damrel returns from a field trip halfway around the world.
\nDamrel is one of 1,100 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program in 2014-2015. The grant enables her to work and conduct botanical research in tropical Southeast Asia. She will lecture and research at the Sarawak Biodiversity Center and the Forestry Research Institute in Malaysia throughout the spring 2015 academic year.
\n\u201cEcologically, Malaysia is a fascinating place and a real treasure house of plant biodiversity,\u201d Damrel says. \u201cIt holds some truly ancient ecosystems and has what some say are the oldest undisturbed equatorial tropical rainforests on earth. It is also facing some serious environmental challenges as there are new economic and social pressures connected with how the land should be used.\u201d
\nDamrel will be working with the Sarawak Center\u2019s Traditional Knowledge Program. It\u2019s a project to gather plants and preserve oral histories and folk wisdom about plants used for cooking and healing. \u201cI will be joining ethnobotanists who visit tribal peoples living in remote parts of the Sarawak highlands. We\u2019ll use powerboats to go upriver and visit communities to gather plants and ask the people about how they use them.\u201d
\nThis is not Damrel\u2019s first trip to the region. She accompanied her husband, David Damrel, an associate professor of comparative religion at USC Upstate, during his Fulbright award to Indonesia in 2008.
\n\u201cIn Java I realized how important it is for Americans \u2014 and our Clemson community and campus particularly \u2014 to take on a more global perspective,\u201d Damrel says.\u00a0\u201c[pullquote]Living and working overseas you get to see the dimensions of a problem \u2014 environmental degradation, for example \u2014 in ways that you cannot fully appreciate from a classroom back home.[\/pullquote] In the same way, firsthand experiences with different peoples, cultures and world-views will help you grow in unexpected ways both as a person and as a scientist.\u201d
\nLooking, looking, always looking.<\/p><\/div>
\n

\"Click<\/a>

Click to read Damrel’s blog.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Botanist, teacher, curator, scholar \u2014 Dixie Damrel encourages her students to experience the green world around them. One step off the asphalt parking lot, Dixie Damrel enters another world. It is a world of individuals, families, clans and communities. Damrel knows the names of thousands of the inhabitants, their Latin names and their familiar ones. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":12427,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[374,414,1331,1482,1563,2038,2521,2663,2925,3298],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-12308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","tag-biodiversity","tag-botany","tag-fulbright","tag-herbarium","tag-idigbio","tag-national-science-foundation","tag-sarawak-center","tag-south-carolina","tag-teaching","tag-winter-2015"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2014\/12\/Botanist1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12308"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}