By Shelley Kofler, KERA News
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-969958.mp3
Fort Worth, TX – This past weekend the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, BRIT, officially opened its new environmentally "green" campus in Fort Worth's Cultural District.
Inside the new, energy efficient headquarters works a team of scientists who want to change the world through plants.
McClatchey: We interact with plants every day. Plants are part of the food we eat, part of our clothing. They recycle everything around us and they're a critical part of keeping us healthy.
Will McClatchey is an ethnobotanist and BRIT's director of research which includes exploration around the globe.
BRIT scientists classifying the diverse plants in a Papua New Guinea forest may help the government there decide where timber should be cut. A project looking at ancient European apple orchards may teach U.S. growers how to use fewer pesticides to produce crops. A study of the LBJ grasslands northwest of Fort Worth may reveal how land use is affecting biodiversity.
McClatchey: One basic question has been: what is the species diversity and how does it change through time?
McClatchey uncaps a Petri dish holding some of the tiniest flowering plants on the planet. Each plant, the size of a pinhead, was collected in the LBJ grasslands.
McClatchey: The plant that I showed you is Wolffia. It is an example of one of many hundreds of plants that inhabit these small wet spots that periodically dry out and then come back when we get a sufficient amount of rain.
The Wolffia specimens will become part of BRIT's growing herbarium. It's one of the largest botanical research libraries in the country with more than a million specimens. BRIT wants to collect examples of every plant on earth.
Amanda Neill: This is the first room specimens enter when they come into the Botanical Research Institute of Texas
Every week hundreds of new plant specimens arrive at BRIT. They're taken to a 15x15 foot sterile looking room that hums with equipment. It's what BRIT Herbarium Director Amanda Neill calls the "dirty room".
She points to what looks like a high school science project- a stack of plants layered in newspaper, strapped tightly into a wooden frame.
Neill: That presses the plants flat which is the first thing you've gotta do. Then we have a couple of plant driers over there.
The drying cabinets heated to 100 degrees remove moisture from the plants. Any insects surviving that are literally frozen to death after spending four days in a freezer set at 40 degrees below zero.
Neill: Our biggest concern in a herbarium is a tiny beetle called an herbarium beetle also known as a cigarette beetle. It's about the size of a piece of lead from a pencil. If it gets into the herbarium it will completely destroy plant specimens it will eat the plant material off of the sheet.
Pressed and purified, the plant samples are ready to be mounted. Neill says some of the specimens just now being preserved have been in storage for a long time.
Neill: I'm looking at a Solomon's Seal specimen that was collected in Massachusetts in 1926.
A long table in the preservation studio includes a cactus collected in New Mexico in 1999; an extinct specimen found in Peru from a tree in the Chicle family; BRIT's oldest plant from the Forget-me-not family collected more than two centuries ago.
Neill: This was collected in 1791 by a botanist named Thaddeus Haenke who traveled with explorers all through the New World.
Researchers who come here can compare plant samples side-by-side and under a microscope; place them in a geographic mapping program; evaluate their DNA.
Researcher Sam Kieschnick of Weatherford is trying to unravel the mysteries of the Comanche Peak prairie clover.
Kieschnick: Personally I think it's fascinating as all get out. But something else that's very interesting about this plant is that it's found only in three counties. It's found in Parker, Hood and Wise counties. The question is why. Why is it just found just in these three counties and not anywhere else in the whole world?
Research Director Will McClatchey says BRIT is preserving history.
McClatchey: Every time one of those plants is pressed and put into our herbarium it basically becomes an additional record of life on earth.
It's a record that may help us make important decisions about natural resource development; food production; land use. Decisions that really could change the world.