Virginia’s Shale Barren Flora and the Legacy of Lena Artz with Andrea Weeks
Date/Time
Thursday, April 14, 2022
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Categories
Dr. Andrea Weeks, Professor of botany and Director of the Ted R. Bradley Herbarium at George Mason University, will shift from her role as scientist to that of historian in her talk: “Virginia’s Shale Barren Flora and the Legacy of Lena Artz.”
Watch the recorded presentation on Vimeo.
Lena Clemons Artz
Lena Clemmons Artz (1891 – 1976) was a botanist and secondary-school educator dedicated to the study of the flora of Virginia, particularly that of its shale barrens and other mountain ecosystems. The National Parks Conservation Association noted that she was “an ardent conservationist as well as an outstanding taxonomic botanist”. [Her] collections of many species of native U.S. wild plants are found in the herbaria of numerous colleges and universities in the East. In addition, she was a respected author and lecturer on American flora. (National Parks and Conservation Magazine, February 1978)
Dr. Andrea Weeks
Dr. Weeks’ research focuses on the systematics, historical biogeography, and evolution of flowering plants, particularly those within the frankincense and myrrh family, Burseraceae. She is interested in testing hypotheses regarding how plant lineages are related, how their extant geographic distributions became established over time, and how their morphological and physiological features evolved. Her studies rely on both molecular data gathered in the laboratory and morphological observations gathered in the field and the herbarium. She also conducts molecular phylogeographic studies of single species to inform taxonomic decisions, establish conservation priorities for vulnerable taxa, and investigate the history of domestication for cultivated species. Dr. Weeks is also director of the Ted R. Bradley Herbarium at George Mason University and is engaged in making this valuable resource of information about the Virginia flora available to the public via the Internet.