Mason HeberlingAssistant Curator of Botany
Carnegie Museum of Natural History Pittsburgh, PA 15213 heberlingm@carnegiemnh.org Blog: collectedonthisday.com Plant physiological ecology, Forest invasions, Biogeography, Roles of herbaria in the Anthropocene
Noteworthy news:* Press releases (here and here) on new research with collaborators showing different responses to climate change between overstory trees and understory wildflowers that depend upon high light in the spring.
* New paper on linking specimens to iNaturalist observations published in Applications in Plant Sciences (link). * Live from the herbarium as part of Scientists Live series to discuss our herbarium digitization project (link). * Check out our organized oral session at the 2018 ESA meeting entitled "New Uses for Old Collections: Herbarium Data in an Era of Ecological Change" (link). * Carnegie Museum herbarium was funded by the US National Science Foundation to join the Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis project! The digitization project will run from 2018-2021 (link). Featured on WESA (link). Specimen metadata and images are available online (link). |
Who I am
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I am a curator in the Section of Botany at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. My main research activities focus on understanding plant invasions in the Eastern Deciduous Forest. Further, I have strong interests in developing innovative uses of natural history collections while also promoting their longstanding functions.
Previously, I was a postdoc funded through an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology, where I leveraged decades of herbarium data to document and understand trait changes in invasive species through space and time. Before that, I was a postdoc in the lab of Susan Kalisz at the University of Tennessee studying the effects of deer and plant invasions on the physiology and demography of forest understory species. I remain actively involved in both lines of research. I did my PhD on the ecophysiology of forest understory shrub invasions at Syracuse University, advised by Jason Fridley. |