Bringing our thesis projects to life in Miami, Florida
Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden, Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park, and the Deering Estate
We traveled to Coral Gables, Florida to connect with scientists, educators, and researchers affiliated with Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden. Throughout our time and conversations with a variety of scientists and educators, we gained insight into what it would be like to pursue a non-academic botany career after graduate school. We visited native populations of both of our thesis study species. Being able to see what these morphological features look like up close in the wild provided us with the context to the countless papers we have read about our study genera.
Deering Estate
Us, along with our advisor, Dr. Rachel Jabaily, visiting the pine rocklands at the Deering Estate, which is one of the most imperiled ecosystems in the world.
We visited the pine rocklands only a few days after a prescribed burn, but the new growth was already well on its way to re-establishing the habitat.
While we visited a variety of ecosystems, the pine rocklands, a critically imperiled ecosystem endemic to Southern Florida was a highlight to botanize in. Getting to experience both what the ecosystem looks like before and after a prescribed burn provided us with an interesting contrast to the conifer-dominated ecosystems of Colorado. Rare and endangered plants were distributed everywhere across every habitat we visited, and we were surprised by how casual the scientists were about these rare plants!
Tournefortia gnaphalodes is a rare species in the Boraginaceae family, which we saw so abundantly on the beach in Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park we had no idea until after!
Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden
Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden is at the forefront of K-12 education and community outreach. The Miami-Dade County public school system is the fourth-largest in the country, and one of the most diverse. Fairchild aims to connect with as many students in these schools as possible, working to raise interest in plants among young school children.
We received a behind-the-scenes look at their Million Orchid Project and collaboration with NASA, which was an incredible space to learn about their educational outreach goals.
Fairchild also supports a horticultural program to get native plants back into home landscapes. It was exceptional to see non-academics utilizing their private land to support pollinators and take a step towards minimizing the effects of human disturbance in their community.
The director of education at the garden, Amy Padolf, shared with us how hard they were working to get the community engaged with plants and it was great to see the pipeline that took them years to develop has been successful (a student from their K-12 education is now a graduate fellow at the garden).
We also learned about their problem-solving strategies to include as many Miami-Dade County schools as possible even if they were far away from the Garden and how they have continued to work with students throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
We gave short presentations about our thesis projects to local high school students in one of Fairchild's educational outreach programs, The Fairchild Challenge.
Meeting with the high schoolers who are conducting their own intensive research with bromeliads, which is the focus of Josh's thesis, and orchids in their community opened our eyes to the scientific discovery that can occur when a strong mentorship system involves different academic levels.
Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park
We were both shocked to see the love for plants and ecosystems in the Miami community. While at Bill Bags State Park, there were countless volunteers helping clean up the beach.
We noticed a strong system of community outreach can happen anywhere; however, you must devote the time to develop this culture by ensuring people feel that they are doing something productive for their community
Caroline's thesis study system is a primarily Australian wildflower family, the Goodeniaceae, but through evolutionary time there have been a few dispersal events that brought the plants across oceans to Miami, among many other tropical coastlines and islands. Seeing these plants in the wild across the beach at Bill Baggs, with the fleshy fruits that brought them across the oceans, was incredibly important for her to keep the project in perspective and tie all of her analyses together.
What this means for our thesis projects
Following this trip, Josh can now visualize spatially how epiphytic bromeliads arrange themselves in trees. Epiphytic bromeliads in the greenhouse at Colorado College are all in empty pots or attached to the walls, so it was hard to picture how these impressive plants live on the sides of trees in the wild.
In addition to contextualizing the extra-Australian dispersal of Goodeniaceae throughout this trip, Caroline saw a Scaevola taccada individual, which is an invasive species of Goodeniaceae. The size of this individual clearly shocked both her and Dr. Jabaily, as they had no idea Scaevola could grow so large.
If we could have spent more time in Florida, engaging longer with the high schoolers would have been beneficial to hear more about their thoughts regarding their time with plants and Fairchild. We both believe that we would have benefited from connecting with undergraduates like ourselves when we were in high school as hearing the thoughts and perspectives from people that are not that far ahead of you in their academic studies can make pursuing a career in botany seem less daunting. Finally, brainstorming with the educators more about how to start to implement a similar botanical educational outreach system in Colorado is another wish of ours if the time allowed.
