Gender and Academic Publishing

Are female researchers well represented as authors of publications in your academic discipline? Ever wonder about the gender differences across different academic fields? A group of scientists asked that question using a data set of 1.8 million scholarly publications from 1665 to 2011 that are archived in the online digital database JSTOR.

The results of their research are not yet published, but you can check out the data using two different interactive graphics. They display the percentage of publications that have women authors, women first authors, and women last authors. They also sort the time-spans into different groups and allow you to narrow down to particular fields or sub-fields.

Basically the interactive graphics are amazing! You can check out two different versions of the graphics at the links below. 

The Chronicle of Higher Education - Women as Academic Authors, 1665-2010

Gender Browser at eigenFACTOR.org - Ranking and Mapping Scientific Knowledge

And why might you ask am I talking about this study on a bryology blog? If you look under Ecology and Evolutionary Biology there are 18.5% female authors, but the subfield of Bryology is much higher than this average at 30.1%. This could be a bit of a numbers game. Bryology has many fewer authors than other more popular fields with only 571 authors included in this study, but still the percentage is quite higher. I am happy to say that a number of my publications are archived in this database and may have contributed to these higher values for the field of bryology.

If you are at all interested in female representation in academic research I would highly recommend checking out the links above. They cover a wide range of fields from biology to education to law to philosophy. Additionally, I enjoyed the news story covering the background behind the publication in this Chronicle of Higher Education article.

Overall I think that it is great documentation of the increase in the involvement of women across academic disciplines over the years. How well are women represented in your favorite specialty field?

Thanks to Dr. Tobias Landberg for sending me the link to this article!

Berry Go Round #56

The newest edition of the plant carnival Berry Go Round has been posted at Seeds Aside.  There are some fun plant posts in the line up that you should definitely check out.

I especially like the post about the new fern genus named for Lady Gaga! I think that it is an interesting way to get taxonomy, systematics, and ferns in the news and on the general public's radar. There is an interview with one of the researchers, Dr. Kathleen Pryer, on the Duke University website and an article in the New York Times about the research.

For more about blog carnivals and my posts about the earlier editions of Berry Go Round, click here.

November 2012 Desktop Calendar

I was hiking in Hubbard Park in Meriden, CT this past weekend and came across this Polytrichum piliferum. It was growing on some rock at the top of the outcrop near Castle Craig. I thought that the calyptra looked especially fuzzy and luminous in the sunshine. Most likely these sporophytes will over-winter at this spear stage and will complete their development by forming capsules in the spring.

1 - Single click on the image to open it up in a new window. (If you use the image directly from the blog post you will lose a lot of resolution.)

2 - Right-click (or ctrl-click) on the image, and chose the option that says, "Set as Desktop Background" or "Use as Desktop Picture". The wording may vary.

3 - If the image does not fit your desktop neatly, you may have to adjust the image (Mac: System Preferences - Desktop and Screen Saver - Desktop; Windows: Control Panel - Display - Desktop) and choose "Fill screen" as the display mode of your background image.

Any issues or suggestions please let me know. These calendars are an experiment in-progress.

Science for Students - Matching Dollars

Want to help teachers in low income communities bring great science to students? 

Consider donating to the plant focused projects at the link below. 

Use the match code SCIENCE when you donate and your dollars will be doubled. 

Thanks!

Moss Plants Donation Page

New Moss Gardening Book

A new book about moss gardening is out! The Secret Lives of Mosses: A Comprehensive Guide for Gardeners by Stephanie Stuber. The book is available in a variety of digital formats and in paperback. Stephanie recently finished her Master's degree in Public Garden Leadership at Cornell University and is now working as a Curatorial Fellow at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, Massachusetts.

Overall I think that is is a good book for people interested in integrating mosses into their home garden and learning more about moss biology. She covers the science, culturing, identification, curation, and interpretation of mosses. Stephanie does a nice job introducing readers to the life cycle and a variety of features that are useful for moss identification. Her habit images are vibrant and helpful, however, the photos of microscopic features are not the best quality and the details are difficult to see. The book includes descriptions of 12 common taxa with pronunciations for each genus, which is nice for folks new to moss scientific names. In the section on culturing, Stephanie highlights a variety of ecological components to think about when planting mosses, including light, moisture, and substrate, as well as more instructional topics such as transplanting, companion plants, and maintenance. The sections on curation and interpretation are more helpful for those working at a public garden rather than the at-home gardener, but it is a nice glimpse behind the scenes of a working botanical garden.

It is apparent that Stephanie is well read and knowledgeable about mosses, but I wish that the text would have included more citations to point the reader to the books she read to gain this expertise. She does cite a study that "...documented that beds of moss over soil provide favorable condition(s) for tree growth in the forest and that the removal of them adversely affects the succession of trees (Thieret 1956)." My general knowledge also is that mosses can serve as a moist nursery for seed germination, but having a scientific study that actually demonstrates and supports this idea is even better. I had not heard of Thieret before and will definitely check out his paper to see the details of the study.

A word of caution, the digital editions of this book are reader program specific. I bought a PDF of the book and missed the note that it will only open in the program Adobe Digital Editions. This file will not open in either Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat Professional. I know that digital formats for books are becoming more and more common, but I am suspect of the longevity of files that only open in one specialized program. I plan on studying mosses for a long time and I would like to be able to read and refer to Stephanie's book for the next 50 years. I am pretty sure that computers will continue to be able to access regular PDF files, but will this specific Adobe Digital Edition program still be around so that I can open up this program-specific file? I would have really liked the option to purchase a regular PDF so that the longevity of my access would be more likely. Maybe I will just buy the paperbook version too. I am pretty sure I will still be able to open and read a hard copy years into the future. 

DonorsChoose Science Blogger Challenge

This is my first year competing in the Science Blogger Challenge. The challenge: Compete against other science bloggers to raise money for science supplies for students.

At DonorsChoose.org, teachers request donations for supplies to implement a particular project in their classroom. Then people like you or I make donations of a little or a lot to fund their supplies and make the project happen. Crowd-sourcing in action! 

There are hundreds of great projects to choose from on the site. I am especially excited about the projects that use plants! They range from science experiments that examine plant pigments to starting a garden to make basic observations about how plants grow. I think that plants are a great way to get students excited and interested in science. Botanical education is lacking in many schools and most people think of plants as only the green background where animals live. Instead of knowing that they are unique, diverse, and dynamic organisms in their own right. Connecting students to the natural world through plants is a great way to increase their thinking about and hopefully care for our planet. 

To this end, I have setup a page with a list of projects that Moss Plants and More is sponsoring. Check out the projects on the page and if you find one that resonates with you make a donation! I started the ball rolling with a small donation to each project on my page. Even if you don't make a donation please spread the word via your favorite technology or social media. The contest runs now through Nov 5th. The website for my page is http://www.donorschoose.org/moss-plants-science-donation-page 


My fellow Field of Science Bloggers, we are currently in 8th place. I bet that we can move up in the ranking and raise some money to put awesome science projects into classrooms! Anyone else interested in joining in?

Moss Plants Donation Page

October 2012 Desktop Calendar

The calendar for October is a blend of several different moss species occupying the crevice in a stone. The one in the center is Bryum argenteum, the silver sidewalk moss. As the common name suggests, this moss is regularly found growing in urban areas in between sidewalk tiles. 

I think that the color is really great, but now that I think of it I am not sure how it produces that color. Deposits in the cell walls? Papillae? Are they covered in hairs? Many questions with no answers. Maybe if I have time tomorrow I will look it up. Otherwise it is some great plant beauty to appreciate even without the scientific explanation.

1 - Single click on the image to open it up in a new window. (If you use the image directly from the blog post you will lose a lot of resolution.)

2 - Right-click (or ctrl-click) on the image, and chose the option that says, "Set as Desktop Background" or "Use as Desktop Picture". The wording may vary.

3 - If the image does not fit your desktop neatly, you may have to adjust the image (Mac: System Preferences - Desktop and Screen Saver - Desktop; Windows: Control Panel - Display - Desktop) and choose "Fill screen" as the display mode of your background image.

Any issues or suggestions please let me know. These calendars are an experiment in-progress.

Plants Are Cool, Too!

Check out the second episode of the botanical series Plants Are Cool, Too! In this episode, they find preserved leaves from trees that grew 15 million years ago. My guess is that there were mosses growing on those trees. I wonder if any of them were preserved too? It would be amazing to get ancient moss DNA or just to see what some of the mosses looked like. Unfortunately mosses do not fossilize as well as other plants, so finding some in these deposits would be amazing too!

Check out the video below and spread it around.

Sept 2012 Desktop Calendar

This is leaf of Physcomitrium pyriforme or P. eurystomum. I am not sure which species. It was a preliminary photo that we took for some leaf cell measurements that we will be making this semester. 

If you are interested in downloading this desktop calendar follow the instructions below. 

1 - Single click on the image to open it up in a new window. (If you use the image directly from the blog post you will loose a lot of resolution.)

2 - Right-click (or ctrl-click) on the image, and chose the option that says, "Set as Desktop Background" or "Use as Desktop Picture". The wording may vary.

3 - If the image does not fit your desktop neatly, you may have to adjust the image (Mac: System Preferences - Desktop and Screen Saver - Desktop; Windows: Control Panel - Display - Desktop) and choose "Fill screen" as the display mode of your background image.

Any issues or suggestions please let me know. These calendars are an experiment in-progress.

Cool New Cryo SEM

The electron microscopy facility that I work in here at UConn just got a new piece of equipment over the summer and I have some images from it to show off. 

The laboratory now has a cryo-stage for the scanning electron microscope! But let's take a step back in case this type of microscopy is new to you. Basically a scanning electron microscope (SEM) shoots electrons at a sample that is placed in a chamber under high vacuum. The electrons bounce off the sample and enable you to detect an image of the surface that is at a much higher magnification than you can see with a light microscope. The light (dissecting) microscope that I have in the lab magnifies 50-250X, whereas the SEM can magnify up to 200,000X! That is pretty awesome in and of itself, but the cryo-stage adds a whole other level to this equipment. Typically the samples that you look at have to be completely dry before placing them into the vacuum. This is a big issue for biological samples, which can be full of water. There are a number of ways to get rid of the water, but these processes often change the shape of the structures. For some studies this is not a major issue, but for other studies scientists are really trying to see what the plants or animals look like when they are hydrated as they would be when alive. 

Cryo-stage to the rescue! With this equipment a sample can be flash frozen in liquid nitrogen with all of the water in place and then placed into the microscope on the chilled cryo-stage. Then the sample can be viewed with the tissues fully hydrated.

I was out of town when they used some of my moss samples for a test run, so I didn't get to see the equipment in action, but here are some of the images that were taken.

This is a leafy gametophyte stem with a cluster of antheridia at the apex. We are looking down at the top of the stem and there is a second leafy gametophyte lying on its side in the background. The leaves are fully expanded and in an arrangement that you would see when hydrated. If they were dry they would be all folded and curled up on themselves.

Here is the cluster of antheridia and hairs at higher magnification. 

And at an even higher magnification. The hairs located in the antheridia clusters in the Funariaceae are characterized by having a large apical cell, which we can see here is fully hydrated. The filaments covering the hairs are probably fungs or bacteria. These mosses were grown in the laboratory but not in sterile conditions.

Some of the leaves were removed from the gametophyte to make for easier viewing. This image shows the inside of the leaf cells. The outline of the cell walls are visible and it is super cool that we can see the water filling each of the cells.

Congratulations to Dr. Cantino and colleagues on their successful National Science Foundation research grant that funded this new piece of equipment.

Moss Tumbleweeds

I just saw this article about mosses living on glaciers in Iceland and the animals living inside them in the New York Times. These balls of moss (glacier mice) are unattached to the ground and can move around the glacier like tumbleweeds. I knew that mosses grow in extreme habitats and even live in Antarctica, but I had not heard about this type of moss growth form before. Pretty cool, moss tumbleweeds!

Coulson, S. and Midgley, N. 2012. The role of glacier mice in the invertebrate colonisation of glacial surfaces: the moss balls of the Falljökull, Iceland. Polar Biology

Glacier Mosses - Fig. 4 from Coulson and Midgley 2012

Other names for these glacier mice are moss balls and rolling moss. This growth form is advantageous for growing on substrates that are unstable like the surface of a glacier or sand dune. 

For some more reading on this type of moss growth form - 

Shacklette, Hansford T. 1966. Unattached Moss Polsters on Amchitka Island, Alaska. The Bryologist 69: 346-352.

Moss Identification Success

Introducing Jaffueliobryum wrightii! Finally I finished up my moss identifications from my field trip to Missouri and Kansas back in March. This is why I don't do much collecting. My collections tend to sit around for quite a while before identifying them makes it to the top of my list of things to do. And unless I have time for identifying them the mosses are best left growing in the wild. 

So Jaffueliobryum wrightii is in the moss family Grimmiaceae. A telling feature is that the leaves have long, white awns at the tips. Thus, I jumped directly to the Grimmiaceae for my identifying. The genus Jaffueliobryum is usually found on calcareous rocks. This population was growing on sandstone. It doesn't really have a common name, but the genus was named for Félix Jafuell, a clergyman who collected plants in South America. There are only 3 species in North America. One only in Mexico and the other two are widely distributed across the western United States. So once I identified it to Jaffueliobryum there were only two species to choose from. The other species, Jaffueliobryum raui, has keeled leaves (the same idea as the keel on a boat, they look folded or have a ridge down the center), which can be easily seen after making a leaf cross-section. Since this sample did not have keeled leaves, it was Jaffueliobryum wrightii.

It was a really fun plant to identify and I'm glad I got the chance to spend some time with it under the microscope. Now off to the herbarium this sample goes.  

    

Identification and species information in this post is from the Bryophyte Flora of North America.