Presentation about Project Baseline, given at the 2014 Calder Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium in Bronx, NY. Presented in January 2015 to seed cleaning team at the New York Botanical Gardens. (http://www.baselineseedbank.org/)

1. Project Baseline
A Seed Bank to study plant evolution

2. Project Baseline:
A seed bank to study how
plants are evolving in
response to global climate
change
- Multi-university, NSF-
funded project
- 2nd summer of 50-year
project

3. How it Began
After a drought, garlic
mustard seeds
exhibited a change in
flowering time

4. Why is the Baseline seed bank useful?
- Little currently known about the rate of
evolution in the wild
- Climate change alters selective pressures,
affects evolution
- Rich source of information about evolutionary
questions for future generations

5. Why is the Baseline seed bank useful? (cont’d)
- Living genome bank allows for use of
resurrection approach
- allows us to distinguish between genotypic &
phenotypic changes

6. Baseline Species & Sites
- Both native and invasive
- Common throughout the United States
- thrive in frequently disturbed meadows
- Collect at sites where we can return for several
decades (university research forests, LTERs)

7. Rumex crispus, or
curly dock
Impatiens capensis,
jewelweed or touch-me-not
Rudbeckia hirta or black-
eyed susan

8. Baseline Field Work
- Depends on phenology:
the timing of the
populations’ life cycle
- Cold, long winter
resulted in later
phenology than usual
Impatiens pallida

9. Map of Summer
2014 Baseline
sites (visited and
collected at ~20)

10. Lake Lacawac, PA Harvard Forest, MA

11. Where do you come in?
- NYBG volunteers clean the seeds so they can
be packaged and sent to the storage facility.
- The seeds will be stored until a scientist uses
them to conduct a resurrection-approach
experiment!

12. Thank you for helping Project
Baseline succeed!

13. Project Baseline Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Steve Franks and Jenn Weber,
our Project manager Katie Winkler, Beth
Ansaldi and the Baseline undergraduate team,
and the volunteer coordinators at the New York
Botanical Gardens.