Event Description
Emily Meineke, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University
"Herbivory through
the ages: Novel methods for revealing how global change affects plant-herbivore
interaction"
Plant and fungal specimens in herbaria are now primary resources for investigating how phenology and geographic distributions shift with climate change, greatly expanding inferences across spatial, temporal, and phylogenetic dimensions. However, historical
specimens contain a wealth of additional data —including nutrients, defensive compounds, herbivore damage, disease lesions, and signatures of physiological processes— that
uniquely capture ecological and evolutionary responses to the Anthropocene but which are less frequently utilized.
Here, I describe how long-term data on interactions between plants and insects extracted from herbarium specimens can inform our understanding of global change. I also describe future data that might be extracted from specimens, including information on changing herbivore diversity. Overall, I argue for the central role of biological collections —many of which are imperilled— in the future of global change biology.
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