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Michael Palmer has the whole world in his hands.
“I’ve always been interested in the outdoors and really appreciating the beauty of nature,” Palmer said
Palmer is working on a collaborative project, “A cyberCommons for Ecological Forecasting.”
Palmer, an OSU regents professor of botany and adjunct professor of zoology, will be working with other researchers from the University of Oklahoma and the University of Kansas on an online project, which received $3 million in grant money from the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research that the National Science Foundation financed.
The “cyberCommons” will be an online database researchers can access to look at a cumulative collection of prior research about floras, or plant lists, throughout North America.
Palmer said this information will help botanists predict the “ecological future,” which refers to the life-support functions like oxygen, clean water, pollinator services, flood control and the aesthetic and spiritual values of nature.
“We will look at whatever people have thought ‘Wow’ to write a flora about.” Palmer said.
The project involves looking at the lists of plant species that people have written in the past. Palmer and his researchers will be looking for these lists in books, dissertations, articles and government documents written from the late 1700s to the present.
He said he’s interested in floras for smaller areas like states, counties, mountains, parks and prairies.
“This is a project I started almost 20 years ago that has slowly been progressing,” Palmer said. “But it looks like it might finally bear some fruit.”
Palmer said this information will be especially useful to botanists who want to predict what the future of plant diversity will look like.
He said this information will serve as a bibliography for scientists and will be useful for them in research and biodiversity, which generally describes the variety of life on Earth.
He said the information on the Web site might help botanists discover how many species are in an area and why there are a certain number of them.
“Once we have a good mathematical model that ties species to climate, we can use that to predict what will happen to plant diversity when climate changes,” Palmer said. “Climate will change in the 21st century a lot more rapidly than it has in human history. It is more important than ever to predict diversity accurately if we hope to prevent extinction.”
Palmer said highlighting areas that might have high rates of extinction, conservationists would be more enabled to prioritize plant conservation efforts.
Palmer has been recognized recently for his research. Last year, Palmer was selected as a regents professor for botany.
“I was certainly pleased, I don’t have a lot of the traditional qualifications most of the regents have. I’m not a department head or dean or have multimillion dollar grants,” Palmer said. “It was a special honor to get it because it implies my academic achievements were ranked.”
Matt Allen, a graduate student pursuing his Ph.D. in plant sciences, started working with Palmer in his lab in fall 2005.
He said he has gotten to work on a number of projects, including his own research on reconstructing wildfire history. He also contributed to a plant virus biodiversity project and long-term studies on forests.
Dave Stahle, a professor of geosciences at the University of Arkansas, said OSU is lucky to have Palmer as a colleague.
“He’s the greatest,” Stahle said. “Mike is really respected around the world for his research, and I know that to be true. He is a world expert.”
Stahle said he and Palmer share an interest in conservation, particularly in the conservation of wild land in Oklahoma. Wild lands are natural areas that have not been humanly altered by creating cities, roads or agricultural fields.
Stahle said the two worked on a conservation project involving an untouched piece of wild land in Keystone Reservoir and got the land set aside as a bioreserve of about 1,500 acres. A bioreserve is a piece of land set aside to protect our natural heritage, Stahle said.
“Some of the oldest trees in Oklahoma are there,” Stahle said. “It wouldn’t have happened without his help.”
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cyberCommons
What: It will contain cumulative information about North American plants to help scientists predict the “ethological future” with plant information from the late 1700s to the present.
When: Michael Palmer has been developing the project for 20 years, but he does not know when the Web site will be available to the public.
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