#naturallyinspiring

[ecosysconak-blog]

#Repost @uafcfos (@get_repost) ・・・ Did you know that a sea otter's teeth can turn purple if it eats too many urchins? #sciencerules #naturallyinspiring #purpleotters Photo by @mdeimangood (at St. Paul, Alaska)

[alaskamuseum]

DISCOVERING ALASKA’S PLANTS AND FUNGI -- The University of Alaska Museum of the North Herbarium (ALA) has been hosting a series of workshops to help people learn to identify the plants and fungi they encounter in their travels and in their own neighborhoods. In August, the museum invited mycologist and author Gary Laursen to lead a mushroom walk on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. More more than 50 people identified and harvested mushrooms as part of the museum's iNaturalist project called Plants and Fungi of Alaska. We asked Curator Steffi Ickert-Bond about the plant identification project and future plans to translate these activities into a grant-funded program.

1) Identifying mushrooms sometimes seems scary. People worry about eating something that will make them sick. What advice would you give people? Why is it important to learn identification skills, not just with mushrooms or edible plants, but in general?

The question itself gives an answer, identification skills can be life savers in case of two very similar looking plants. Many poisonous plants can strongly resemble an edible plant at first glance. Just to be safe, it is a good tactic to teach children to stay away from all berries and let an adult decide that the beery is safe to eat. The white clusters of baneberry are deadly poisonous. 2) What surprised you about the walk? What were some of the reactions people had to the event that stuck with you?

The turnout for this event was surprising, but more so the bounty of the harvest. There were just so many mushrooms! People brought back a number of them I had never even seen before. The range of colors was amazing. It was also very exciting to see Dr. Laursen walk us through the general ID for the major groups of mushroom, how distinct those groups really are:  the coral mushrooms, the tooth mushrooms, the boletus, the polypores, and of course the agarics, which include the fly agaric, a mushroom renowned for its toxicity and hallucinogenic properties (sometimes called the Alice-in-Wonderland mushroom).

PHOTO ABOVE: A variety of mushrooms collected on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus on display on a late-August evening.

When Gary dove into the bolete mushrooms, it was very interesting to hear his discourse of the various techniques he uses to see if a seemingly similar and potentially edible mushroom could turn out to be a species one would stay away from. Watching the discoloration on hymenium after the mushroom is cut in longitudinal sections was one of the characteristics he stressed.

PHOTO ABOVE: Gary Laursen, author and mushroom expert, talks about bolete mushrooms after a recent identification walk hosted by the Herbarium at the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

3) The UAMN Herbarium (ALA) hosted a series of identification workshops this summer. What are you plans for this project? How can people get involved as volunteers and participants? We are trying to foster a cadre of excited volunteer botanists and outdoor enthusiasts to make plant observations and document the flora of Alaska while they are out and about. Even with the 260,000 specimens we currently have in the herbarium collection at UAMN, still many large spatial gaps exist on the map of Alaska.

Although Alaska is relatively species-poor at a per-site level, its vast size, special geologic history, and relatively low level of historical plant exploration means that it contains perhaps the highest proportion of undiscovered species of flora in the United States. With climate changing faster in Alaska than any other U.S. state, we are seeing major vegetation shifts, including tundra shrubification and the increasing incidence of catastrophic fires. Species-level monitoring is a vital part of assessing what is going on.

With the decrease in federal funding for this kind of research, we think the only way we can document biodiversity is by involving the general public to submit their photographs and make observations to the museum’s iNaturalist site. We also hope to foster support from the National Science Foundation. The project will continue to run through the fall of 2016. Contact the herbarium if you are interested to get on a mailing list and watch our Facebook page for announcements of upcoming events.

4) Several of the museum's curators are involved with identification events like BioBlitz and "walks" that engage citizen scientists. Is there any attempt to coordinate this outreach among different departments at the museum? What is the value of citizen science for museum work? I am sure we are going to have more organized, collaborative events in the future. The Herbarium wants to capitalize on the enthusiasm to develop a citizen science initiative, hopefully spurring new collecting, and to also recruit trained plant observers (para-botanists) to help fill in some of the blanks spots on the ARCTOS plant specimen distribution map, and maybe even to generate some data relevant to climate change.

While the Bioblitz approach takes a more wholistic view and collects everything in a particular area, we feel most comfortable with working with our organism(s) of choice - plants and fungi. iNaturalist is the obvious platform for collecting plant observations. It’s an excellent tool, with all sorts of capabilities for data management. It even contributes ‘research grade’ observations to GBIF (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility). We started a project on iNaturalist, Plants and Fungi of Alaska, where we can coordinate teams and collect relevant information in one place.

You can get involved by joining the UAMN Herbarium’s iNaturalist project online or on an application downloaded to your mobile electronic device. 

[ohhgosh-goaway]

View this post on Instagram

#naturallyinspiring #conferenceservices #humanknot #lol