Mexico trip: Book, butterflies and rock and roll

By Richard B. Primack

“Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.”

 -Henry David Thoreau

In late February, I traveled to Mexico to help launch the new Spanish-language Latin American edition of my conservation biology textbook. Omar Vidal, my co-author, is the former Director of World Wildlife Fund Mexico. 

Omar and I at the publisher’s bookstore.

We had many media interviews, a formal presentation at the Mineral Palace (where Humboldt spoke in the early 1800s), and a party afterwards. The presentation included Martha Delgado (on left), Deputy Minister for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Julia Carabias (on right), former Minister of the Environment and renowned Mexican environmentalist.

Book presentation at the Mineral Palace.

We visited the Art Museum to see the Diego Rivera murals. I also visited UNAM, the national university of Mexico, to present a talk and to learn about their research and conservation activities. 

Diego Rivera’s poster about the dangers of Mexican folklore and tourism. 

On the last day we visited the Monarch Butterfly reserve marveling at hundreds of thousands of butterflies covering the branches of fir trees. Unusually warm weather made the butterflies active, swirling between the trees. The butterflies are expected to leave the reserve within days to begin their journey north. There were unexpectedly large numbers of Mexican tourists.

Monarch butterflies at the El Rosario sanctuary (video). 

The reserve is well-organized and easily accessible. Many foreign tourists have recently canceled trips to the area due to safety concerns, but the area felt very safe to us. 

At the entrance to the reserve with Sergio Vallin (in the middle).  

During this visit we were accompanied by Sergio Vallin, a guitarist with the popular Mexican rock band Mana.  

New OPUS grant for the Primack Lab.

By Richard B. Primack

“My only integral experience is in my vision”

—Henry David Thoreau

We recently received a new National Science Foundation grant through the OPUS program entitled, “The impacts of changing phenology on species, ecological interactions, and conservation.” OPUS is an acronym for Opportunities for Promoting Understanding through Synthesis.

This project will allow my former students and I to write a series of review articles on topics related to our research activities on climate change, phenology, sampling biases with historical data, ecological mismatches, botanical gardens and conservation.  

Euonymus oxyphyllus growing at the Arnold Arboretum. 

The project will also assist us to make our research datasets publicly available, along with the metadata needed to use this data in other research projects. For example, for the past 17 years we have been gathering data on the flowering times, leafing out times, and bird arrival times in Concord, MA, building on the observations of Henry David Thoreau.  We have also been accumulating data on how the abundance of plants species has been changing over time Concord. This data will soon be available on-line. 

Cherry blossom festival in Tokyo. 

Datasets from elsewhere in the USA and other countries where we have worked, including China, South Korea, Japan, and Germany, will similarly be available on-line. This includes the network of eight botanical gardens that monitored the phenology of over 1600 species of woody plants.

Wildflowers have a fear of trees! A new project begins.

by Richard B. Primack

“Don't be afraid that your life will end, be afraid that it will never begin!”

-Henry David Thoreau

We have received a new NSF-funded project to determine if trees in the eastern United States, like oaks and maples, respond more rapidly to a warming climate than spring woodland wildflowers, like trout lilies and anemones. If so, the wildflowers might be getting shaded out in spring, reducing their ability to mature their fruits in summer and to grow and flower in later years. This is an example of an ecological mismatch between different species, in this case trees and wildflowers, and could lead to the decline of woodland wildflowers.

Trees such as this big-toothed aspen are leafing out earlier in the spring.

This work builds on the observations of famous environmental philosopher Henry David Thoreau from the 1850s in Concord, MA, combined with our own observations from 2004 to the present, which show that trees leaf out earlier now than in the past and wildflowers are flowering earlier.

Wildflowers, such as this pink lady’s slipper orchid, might be shaded out by trees in coming years.

We are using herbarium specimens, which are plant museum specimens, to extend our study across the entire eastern United States. Much of this work is being carried out by BU grad student Tara Miller with help from others.

Colleagues in China and Germany will carry out comparable studies, allowing us to determine if this mismatch between trees and wildflowers is really a global phenomenon. 

Mason Heberling at one of the Pittsburgh field sites.

Our co-PIs on this grant, Mason Heberling at the Carnegie Museum and Sara Kuebbing at the University of Pittsburgh, will carry out complementary experiments to determine the combinations of temperature and photoperiod that trees and wildflowers use to start their spring activity.  They will also measure photosynthetic rates of wildflowers to determine how they respond to reduced light levels.

This work was recently covered by the Daily Free Press.