New Brunswick, N.J. (Aug. 27, 2018) – Rutgers Professor Lena Struwe is available to provide insight on the recent finding of an endangered plant species last spotted in New Jersey 100 years ago.
A New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection botanist found stalked woolgrass (Scirpus pedicellatus) growing along the Delaware River shore in Warren County, north of Worthington State Forest, on July 25. The last New Jersey sighting of the plant was on July 4, 1918, in Sussex County, according to a DEP news release. DEP Botanist David Snyder, a visiting scientist at Rutgers who is associated with the Chrysler Herbarium at Rutgers, made the recent discovery.
“This is very exciting,” said Struwe, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources and Department of Plant Biology at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and director of the Chrysler Herbarium at Rutgers. “The flora of New Jersey is very rich but surprisingly poorly known, and we are one of the few states that never had a state flora published. New Jersey is at the crossroads of northern and southern species, Appalachian species to the west and coastal species to the east – a true melting pot of biodiversity. Fragments of natural habitats are very important to preserve biodiversity, especially in this highly urban and suburban state. And now with climate change, the flora is changing even further, with species moving due to temperature.”
“In our National Science Foundation-funded (Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis) project in the Chrysler Herbarium, we are providing online data and images of our collections from New Jersey, which will help document what has been here, what is still here and what is lost (then hopefully found again),” she said. “This is part of a large multi-institute project that seeks to provide digital access to more than 700,000 specimens, each of them a snapshot in time of a species from a specific locality on a specific date, which until now have been hidden inside steel cabinets for protection and preservation.”
Professor Struwe, who teaches evolution, botany, and plant systematics in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, is available at [email protected]
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