Carnegie Museum will partner with Pitt, Boston University to study climate-change effects

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the University of Pittsburgh and Boston University will partner on a three-year collaborative research project to study the effects of climate change and invasive plants on trees and wildflowers.

The three entities were awarded a $646,000 National Science Foundation grant to study “phenological mismatches between trees and wildflowers mediated by climate change and invasive plants,” according to the Carnegie Museum.

In plain language, research by members of all three groups suggests that tall trees get spring leaves faster than wildflowers in response to warmer-than-usual temperatures. Those mismatches could potentially reduce the number of wildflowers — which will not have access to the typical amount of sunlight — and impact forest diversity.

Study sites include those managed by the Allegheny Land Trust, Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania and Powdermill Nature Reserve, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s field station in Cook Township, Westmoreland County.

“Natural history collections have never been more relevant,” said Mason Heberling, assistant curator of botany at the Carnegie. “They uniquely position us to study these relationships across a century of change and worldwide. Combining museum specimens with new fieldwork, we are poised to better understand the past and predict future impacts to forests.”

The project also includes coordination with the public through social media, lectures, on-site museum activities and workshops for educators integrating forest monitoring and local examples of climate change into school curricula.

Since 2015, the Carnegie has been awarded $2.5 million in National Science Foundation funding for projects including STEM education programs and the preservation of the museum’s herpetology collection.

“For public engagement on climate change, it is especially important that we study systems like this in our own backyards,” said Steve Tonsor, interim director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.