"Iowa" Flora?

 Hybridization (in teaching) in the Evolution of the Iowa Flora

SARS-CoV-2 transformed (well, not personally) a two-semester academic year calendar into four, half-length terms at Grinnell College. Now, in term “Spring 2,” a bit over half the students are on campus or living in town, with the rest comprising a far-flung diaspora. For the first time since March, 2020 I’ve been able to take students on field trips and work with them in the lab, but about half my students in BIO 305 are learning fully remotely (though, somewhat conveniently, all in the continental United States). Shipping plant presses to the remote students allowed everyone to learn to collect and identify plants while considering plant systematics concepts, but not everyone has learned “on the ground” about the flora of Iowa. In a second course unit on the history of the Iowa flora, we made another necessary adjustment. 

The “Vegetation History” course unit concerns paleoecological and historical studies. Typically, we ask, how did the Iowa flora come to consist of the plant diversity it does, rather than some other set of plants (Fig. 1)? This time around we’re asking, how did the floras of the regions where students are collecting (Iowa and adjacent states, southern California, central Appalachia) come to be as they are?

Fig. 1. A conceptual model of the historical development of the Iowa Flora since the Last Glacial Maximum. Click to sharpen and enlarge.

For this blogging assignment I asked my students to act like a research scientist who wants to highlight an important publication of their own or by others to a broad audience of scientists and interested non-scientists. My favorite professional model for this kind of research blogging is Corey Bradshaw’s ConservationBytes. In the blog posts that follow, my BIO 305 students communicate recent articles that are relevant to the region where they are assembling their plant collections.