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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, Any and all things herbaria
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. News coverage here, here, and here.
*New paper looking at mycorrhizal communities from century old herbarium specimen roots (link) (museum blog) (press release for special issue on belowground botany). * New paper on linking specimens to iNaturalist observations published in Applications in Plant Sciences (link) (museum blog). * 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). |
orcid.org/0000-0003-0756-5090
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. |