Granted: Studying Ancient Trees to Understand our Climate Future
In his Sharpless Hall lab, Professor Jonathan Wilson studies how ancient plants responded to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Photo by Patrick Montero.
Details
Professor Jonathan Wilson reconstructs Earth’s climate past—work that helps his students become researchers and informs our understanding of a warming world. This is Granted, Haverford’s series on the impact of federal funding.
Professor of Environmental Biology and Environmental Studies Jonathan Wilson
Source of funding: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Amount: $250,306
About my work: My National Science Foundation-funded research project establishes how faithfully plants respond to, and record, changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. We grew Ginkgo biloba trees in high-CO2 chambers and monitored how they responded to this novel atmospheric environment.
Understanding how past climate change unfolded is vital to understanding what might transpire in the future—but our knowledge of past events relies upon tools that record this environmental history in an accurate way. Our research found reasons for optimism, and also a few reasons for concern, about using plant fossils—the gold standard for deep-time CO2—to derive this history. Our discoveries have led to major methodological improvements that are likely to make a splash in the next year or two.
Project alumni are at prestigious Ph.D. programs in the plant or environmental sciences: University of Tasmania, Harvard, and the MIT-WHOI joint program, respectively. They are working with some of the best and most famous scientists in the world.
Owen Cross '25, Wyatt Mattison '25, Rebecca Hametz-Berner '25, and Shoshi Hornum '25:
For our theses, Jon divided up the taxa included in the NSF grant amongst the four of us. Shoshi looked at unique plants during the Carboniferous and Permian period (the time of the largest rainforest collapse), Wyatt and Owen studied cycads and conifers, respectively, at the TJ Boundary (a major mass extinction), and I worked with conifers and their ancestors across the Phanerozoic (the past 400 million years). All of our data will be directly used in the database. We all measured various parameters of the xylem (water transport cells) in our fossil plants to estimate the drought resistance of our taxa. We measured from microscopy images using ImageJ and conducted data analysis in Excel and R.
A big takeaway from our theses is the functional diversity we all observed. We all observed variability inter- and intra-species, which means that there was a range of physiologies and environments that our plants could inhabit. We saw how these variable traits may determine the plant's fate in the midst of climatic transitions, which illuminated the plasticity or resilience of certain plant lineages across time. Furthermore, we all gained an understanding of which plants will be most vulnerable or which traits will be most critical as we face anthropogenic climate change. In sum, our theses celebrated floral diversity but also warned of the fragility of ecosystems in response to rapid change.
'Thesising' in the midst of a larger NSF grant immersed us in this niche world, helping us to understand the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of environmental research.
Federal grants can be life-changing for faculty, students, and those who benefit from their research. Granted, a series about federally funded research, showcases the sort of projects that need your financial support to offset recent, unplanned cuts in government funding. Learn more about how to support research at Haverford.
