Sharing a passion for science
On Monday evening, Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Elizabeth Crone held her audience at the Arnold Arboretum’s Weld Hill Research Building classroom in rapt attention. It could have been a college course in theoretical ecology with a touch of sugar maple research. Instead, it was the latest public lecture by a Harvard researcher during the Cambridge Science Festival. Crone, who leads a team of researchers at Harvard Forest, has been studying the reproduction of sugar maples and pollination strategies, including the kinds of bees that visit flowers in tree canopies. During the lecture, she outlined her team’s research, which points to a correlation between the amount of seeds a tree sets the previous fall — sugar maples are mast seeders, producing heavy seed production followed by years of larger seed crops — and the sugar content of the sap produced. Given last fall’s heavy seed crop and analysis of maple syrup production, she...