A 100-year-old plant collection is key in understanding insect damage
When she set out to understand whether climate changes over the past century were affecting insects’ patterns of eating and damaging various plants, Emily Meineke decided to go straight to the source: the vegetation samples. A postdoctoral researcher working in the lab of Charles Davis, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and director of the Harvard Herbaria, Meineke is the lead author of a first-of-its-kind study that used herbarium specimens to track insect herbivory (the eating of plants) across more than 100 years. The study is described in a Sept. 4 paper published in the Journal of Ecology. The paper is co-authored by Aimée Classen and Nathan Sanders, who are affiliated with the University of Vermont and the Gund Institute for Environment, and Jonathan Davies, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia. Across four species — shagbark hickory (Carya ovata), swamp white oak (Quercus bicolor), showy tick trefoil (Desmodium canadense), and...