February's Sustainability Champion: Dr. John Hayden

This month's Sustainability Champion is Biology Professor Dr. John Hayden. Read our full interview below to learn about all the work he has done teaching, conducting research, curating the campus herbarium, and managing the campus greenhouse throughout his 39 years at University of Richmond.

How did you end up at UR?
At the time, I had the choice between two opportunities — this teaching position and a post-doc position with the US Department of Agriculture in Georgia. The latter position would have paid more, but I really wanted a university position because I wanted a balance of teaching and research and I wanted to be able to do research projects that were of interest to me. I was, and still am, very interested in plant biodiversity. 
 
What inspired your interest in botany?
That goes way back. I grew up on 55 acres in rural Connecticut and we always had a big garden. As early as I can remember, I helped out with the garden. My dad was into plants and he would go through these phases with different ornamental plants. He would be all about irises, then rhododendrons, then day lilies. He had a ramshackle greenhouse and he would bring in the chrysanthemums before first frost so they could bloom. Then in the spring he would take cuttings, put them in moist sand, and in a week or two there was a whole new baby plant. I thought that was like magic. 
 
Only about 10 or 15 acres on our property were garden or pasture though, most of the property was woods. In my early teens, I began taking long walks in the woods, just looking at plants. We had amateur level plant identification books and one of my uncles had a nice set of sophisticated guides, and I started learning to identify plants. Once I started undergrad at University of Connecticut, I chose to major in biology and I took every plant course they had available. 
 
How has your research evolved over time?
While I was in undergrad, I worked on a research project making microscope slides to examine the anatomical structure of plants in the genus Selaginella. Then in grad school at University of Maryland, my adviser was Bill Stern; he was a big name in plant anatomy. He assigned me a problematic genus, Picrodendron, that grows on on several islands of the Greater Antilles. The first thing written about this poor plant was in the 1690s, and when I got the assignment in 1973 there was still no agreement which family it belonged to. So I had to describe the leaf and wood structure and try to determine the relationship. There were other people working on pollen, which clenched the case, but my work on anatomy reinforced the conclusion that it was a member of Euphorbiaceae. I did more extensive research on Euphorbiaceae for my PhD work (it's a cool family with lots of strange plants) and that's been at the core of what I've done for almost 40 years at UR. However, I don't only do microscope comparative stuff. I also study plant morphology broadly and I do a lot of work with herbarium specimens, which led me to name four species of Amanoa new to science. 
 
Can you describe the campus herbarium and what's in it?
An herbarium is a collection of dried, pressed, and preserved plants. It's used to document plant diversity. I manage the herbarium here on campus. Robert Smart began our herbarium in the 1930s. Today we have a modest sized collection with about 30,000 specimens. Two-thirds of our specimens are vascular plants and one-third are other things like fungi, lichens, slime molds, algae, and mosses. We actually have the definitive collection of slime molds and Cladonia lichens in Virginia. I've added plants from Central Virginia, but I also add plants from where I travel and do field work, and I acquire plants through exchanges. We have about 1,000 specimens from Southeast China that were acquired through an exchange. It's great to use these specimens in class to answer questions or to serve as classroom display specimens. Really, I try to take specimens wherever I happen to be if I’m able. It makes the collection richer and adds to our understanding of the biodiversity of Earth.
 
One memorable sample I collected came from the UR campus. I was walking along and noticed a Commelina that I didn’t recognize. I plucked a sample, took it back the lab, and eventually was able to identify it because we had an identical specimen from China in the herbarium. That plant had underground flowers and we were able to study those and infer how the self-pollination mechanism worked, which hadn’t been described before. That led to a nifty publication.
 
Digitization is a big thing with herbaria nowadays because it allows photos and information about specimens to be available and searchable globally. Most of the specimens in our herbarium are digitized and I would like to finish digitizing the fungi before I retire. Another thing I’m currently working on is identifying mosses in Central Virginia. The Digital Atlas of Virginia Flora shows which counties different plants grow in across the state based on herbarium samples, but we’re still in the very early stages of collecting information on mosses.
 
Where have you done fieldwork?
One of my undergraduate professors taught a yearlong course on flowering plant diversity and talked a lot about working in the jungles of Latin America. In that class, I decided I wanted to do fieldwork in the tropics someday. Flash forward to 2000 and I find myself teaching a forest ecology unit for a course called "Living in Yucatan". The course was organized by Millsaps College and my unit was taught at their field station in Yucatan, Mexico. On that first trip I resolved to do a plant inventory for the station, now known as Kaxil Kiuic. That was exciting work. I was in that forest during a hurricane, I saw jaguar footprints in the mud, I came face-to-face with a boa constrictor, and the plants were cool, too. You can see all the plants from the inventory, more than 400 species, the result of seven years’ work, on my website. 
 
What sort of classes do you teach?
I've taught yearlong introductory biology courses that span the breadth of biology, but I've generally focused on plant biology. In my systematic botany course, we focus on local flora and students learn to identify plants and collect plant specimens. Some of those became part of the official scientific collection. Resources provided by the herbarium and the greenhouse are important in all my courses. Currently, I teach a course on Mesoamerican Ethnobotany, which covers many topics found in introductory botany; it also examines the plants that people in Mesoamerica use for food, clothing, and medicine. In that course, we also consider differences in ancient agriculture and modern industrial agriculture, and we discuss biofuels and genetically modified plants. 
 
What kinds of botany-related things are you involved with outside of UR?
I work with the Flora North America Project, which is an effort to compile information on all the plants in North America. I wrote up three genera for the project and I serve on the Southeast regional review team, so I look over the information whenever a group of plants gets close to being published. I'm also the botany chair for the Virginia Native Plant Society and each year I write a brochure for the Wildflower of the Year and four additional articles about it. Besides that, I'm a member of the Virginia Botanical Associates, the organization that manages the Digital Atlas of the Virginia Flora. 
 
How does sustainability intersect with your work?
As I see things, plants are — and always have been — integral to the long-term sustainability of human life on planet Earth. In terrestrial environments, plants form the foundation of food chains that support all other forms of life; plants create the habitats in which animals live out their lives; plants are important components of biogeochemical cycles; and plants define ecological units from communities to biomes. In more strictly human terms, plants feed us, provide the oxygen that we breathe, clothe us, produce energy for us, and medicate us when we are sick. Plants live their lives in the interface between the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, and the atmosphere; consequently, plants are critical for the formation and maintenance of healthy soils, and clean water and air. You cannot disentangle plants from sustainability.

My teaching and research revolve around central aspects of organismal plant biology: plant diversity, plant structure (at diverse levels of magnification), plant growth, and plant systematics. We have already talked about the UR herbarium, and it must be acknowledged that this resource is an essential component of my research. But in the context of larger perspectives on sustainability, I feel compelled to point out that the UR herbarium, like herbaria everywhere, is a storehouse of raw data about the plant life of our planet. Herbarium collections are formal, scientific, records of what grew, where, and when. If we, as a society, want to preserve biodiversity, we need to know what is out there, when it flowers, when it makes seeds, when it is active, when it is dormant — all this information, and more, is preserved in herbarium specimens. Now that collections are becoming digitized, “big data" analytics can explore the data content of mountains of herbarium specimens to reveal previously hidden signals of, for example, climate change. Consequently, when I work in the UR herbarium I am doing much more than pursuing my own teaching or research agenda. I am maintaining and adding to UR’s portion of a global network of primary data about plants. In my mind, curating the UR herbarium is a sacred trust to the discipline of botany and a service to all humanity.

Thank you John for all you do to contribute to sustainability on campus. Do you know someone who should be featured as a Sustainability Champion? Let us know at sustainability@richmond.edu.