Plant Sale - 2012 February

The Botany Club recently held a plant sale in the Williams Conservatory. This is a traditional event for the club to generate support for its activities which include purchasing additional plants for the Conservatory to further diversify the collection for all to enjoy.

The Botany Club is free and open to anyone interested in plants and has funded a variety of field trips in the past to places such as the Denver Botanical Gardens, Celestial Seasonings, Fantasy Orchid Nurseries outside of Boulder, Bath Greenhouses in Ft. Collins, Cheyenne Botanical Gardens and Yellowstone National Park. 

The Botany Club is a student organization and is dependent on student initiative to coordinate meetings and activities. It is a good way to interact with faculty, staff, students, and the community.

--- Contributed by BJ Mitchell & Bill Higgins

What will Wyoming's grasslands look like in a hundred years?

Warming temperatures and rising carbon dioxide in the air are likely to shift the dominant plant species and alter soil nutrient availability, according to experimental conditions in the Prairie Heating and CO2 Enrichment experiment near Cheyenne. The experiment is being conducted in native grassland by Botany professors Elise Pendall and Dave Williams, in collaboration with Jack Morgan and other researchers at the Agricultural Research Service in Fort Collins, CO.

Results from the first three years suggest that cool season grasses, favored by grazers, may give way to warm season species with lower forage quality. However, warmer temperature increases the availability of nitrogen in soil, a key ingredient of proteins in leaves. This may offset reductions in tissue quality brought about by the higher carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and species shifts. More details can be found in our paper published in Nature.

The balance between carbon dioxide uptake by plants and decomposition in grassland soils will determine how much carbon is ultimately stored in ecosystems. Williams’ group is studying how photosynthesis reacts to the experimental conditions. Pendall is studying these carbon cycling processes using chambers designed for the experiment, shown in the photo with graduate research assistant Nick Brown. Carbon cycling is affected by the futuristic carbon dioxide levels, especially during low-precipitation years, but the grassland ecosystem is more resilient to warmer temperatures.

For more information, contact Dr. Elise Pendall, pendall@uwyo.edu, or visit the Pendall Lab website at https://sites.google.com/site/pendalllab/.