ENHS Nature Trails March 2003 Article 1

This month's speaker: Bitty Roy

This month's speaker, a 1993-1995 National Science Foundation Fellow, Dr. Bitty Roy, shares something in common with most Oregonians who enjoy the out-of-doors: a love of the early spring wildflowers. I suspect we'll see a few slides Friday night that reflect this shared interest. Bitty Roy's love of flowers and plants began at quite an early age in a place that certainly has its share of the early denizens of spring. Below she tells us how the people and events of her growing up years nurtured and shaped her interests. (And what about Jude?)

A TOAD NAMED JUDE
I've always been interested in nature, especially plants. I grew up living at a high elevation, nearly 9,000 feet, in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. We could have snowstorms any day of the year, and usually had snow on the ground from September until early May. I was always really excited to see the flowers again after the long winter and I still love the early spring plants the best. To preserve the green that I missed so much in the winters, I started making terrariums at a very young age. By the time I was ten or so these glass fantasy lands had expanded to large sizes. I convinced my father to allow me to use an antique glass showcase he had found at an auction. It was about 8 feet long, 3 feet across and 18 inches high. I populated it with mosses, plants and a toad named Jude . I kept this mini ecosystem growing for years.

FROM MOM TO MOUNTAIN MAN AND A COLLEGE PROFESSOR
Love of plants is matrilineal in my family. My maternal grandmother bred irises as a hobby and my mother loved plants. When I was a teenager, she moved to a lower elevation and bought an apple orchard. We used to spend hours when I was a kid identifying all the flowers in the alpine meadows near where I grew up. She definitely encouraged me. My first copy of the Flora of Colorado was given to me by her when I was eleven, and I still have it. My first mentor as a kid was a kindly "mountain man" named Stuart Mace. He lived a bit further up Castle Creek Road than my family did and was trained in botany. He was also interesting because he had dog teams and an art gallery. He always answered my questions about plants and allowed me to tag along on "adult" field trips. He taught me a lot about the environment and in retrospect, was an early "environmentalist." The person who helped me the most in college was a professor of plant ecology at Evergreen named Al Weideman. He allowed me to do an independent project in Hawaii that turned into an incredible, one and one half year adventure of botanical and evolutionary exploration. The one and a half years in Hawaii was very special. I learned a lot about plants, conservation and evolution. The native flora there is wonderful--more than 95% endemic, and the climatic extremes (4 to about 600 inches of rain) are fantastic.

DIVERSITY AT WORK AND AT PLAY
The six years I spent in Switzerland were also quite formative. The Europeans are, in general, more environmentally and botanically aware than Americans. I learned a lot from them. (Bitty's formal education has been supplemented by collecting plants in Baja for a joint US/Mexico project for the Rancho Santa Anna Botanic Garden; backpacking for a month on New Zealand's south Island; backpacking in Alaska's Brooks Range; hiking the high route across (and up and down) Switzerland, and hiking in Iceland, Norway and Sweden. (I suspect Oregon too.) And today her hobbies include backpacking, ski mountaineering, and cross country skiing.)

CLIMB TO 13,900 FEET AND FEEL BETTER
My first dissertation project failed catastrophically due to a combination of a growth chamber malfunctioning and a lack of access to some key equipment. I actually went to my advisor's house to quit, but she wasn't home. So I went home, had a three-day migraine headache, and somehow decided to keep going. My advisor, partner, and I decided to climb a mountain (Teocali, 13,900 feet) to make me feel better and to talk about what I should do. On the way up we kept seeing all these rust infected mustard plants, and Paulette, my advisor, said: "Bit, you've been intrigued by this crazy infection all summer; why don't you do something with plant pathogens?" After climbing the mountain and nearly being hit by lightning in the process, I decided that, "yeah," I did find sick plants interesting, and I still do.

AND BACK TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
I had the good fortune of getting a job at the University of Oregon. I've wanted to return to the Northwest ever since I finished my undergraduate degree 20 years ago, but I had to wait until I found a job.

WHAT WILL WE HEAR ABOUT FRIDAY NIGHT?
You'll hear about the direct and indirect effects of climate change on the abundance and diversity of plant pests (insects and fungi). Much of the research I've done on this topic was in Alaska and Colorado, so there will be pretty pictures of these places as well.

Dr. Roy currently does research and teaches as an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at the University of Oregon. She's taught non majors in Evolutionary Biology and upper-division students in The Evolutionary Biology of Disease. Her research is primarily concerned with the ecological and evolutionary consequences of wild plant pathogens in natural plant populations. She earned her Ph.D. in 1992 from Claremont Graduate School/Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden. Her dissertation engendered by that propitious climb is titled, "Genetic diversity, disease incidence, and pathogen-mediated selection in apomictic Arabis (Brassicaceae)." She earned her MS at Southern Illinois University and her BS at Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington. ENHS welcomes Bitty Roy to our podium Friday night for both an interesting and very timely topic.

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