The director of Case Western Reserve’s University Farm dresses elegantly and works out of a charming office on the top floor of a former dairy barn. But Ana Locci once had a less illustrious post on these 400 acres 10 miles east of campus. During the early 1980s, while completing her master’s degree in aquatic ecology, she assisted her faculty advisor on the farm. Once a week, she climbed inside giant, foul-smelling fish tanks and scrubbed them clean. Fieldwork in the Snowbelt was no joke either, particularly for a native Venezuelan. “I was in the ponds in the middle of the winter, breaking through the ice and doing all sorts of water measurements,” she laughs. “It nearly killed me!”
University Farm Director Ana Locci inspects plants at the hydroponics facility in the Green Barn, which produces lettuce and endives for animals at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. Photo by Mike Sands.
Consisting of several properties, with Squire Valleevue and Valley Ridge Farms the largest, the University Farm is best known for its recreational opportunities. Generations of students have stayed at the Pink Pig, a pig sty-turned-cottage. (A former silo across the lawn still serves as the cottage’s restroom.) Many locals have traversed the farm’s hiking and cross-country ski paths, enjoyed its picnic areas or taken continuing education courses on topics from beekeeping to blueberry farming. In recent years, the farm’s food program has also earned notice. Last year, over 13,000 pounds of organic produce went to Case Western Reserve’s campus dining program, local farmers’ markets and the farm’s community-supported agriculture program.
Yet Locci, an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Biology, loves the farm most for the research opportunities it provides. Both science and science education have long been part of the farm’s mission. Under Locci, who became director in 2000, they have increased exponentially.
“I used to do everything I could to bring research here,” she says. “At this point, it’s coming so fast and so quick that I don’t need to. It’s wonderful.”
Andrew Squire, the prominent Cleveland attorney who willed what is now the largest portion of the farm to Western Reserve University, wished for the female students of Flora Stone Mather College to “learn practical botany” and “learn to love and enjoy the beauties of nature, trees, and flowers.” The university inherited 277 acres from him in 1937, but research did not gain steam until the 1950s. Zoologist Darhl Foreman, professor emerita of biology until her death this summer, conducted one of the earliest projects, an examination of the effect of light on the reproductive cycle of prairie dogs.
Since then, science at the farm has had its peaks and troughs. Locci remembers an active research community from her years as a grad student. But by the time she became director, that community had largely disappeared, and the Farm, she says, had turned into “a picnic area.” Locci was hired, in part, to forge ties with faculty members. She has been so successful that the farm is now one of the main attractions for new ecology hires in the biology department.
“The farm was a huge draw,” says Sarah Diamond, assistant professor of biology, who studies how insects respond to climate change, biological invasion and urbanization. Since joining the faculty in January, Diamond has started collecting butterflies for her lab research in the farm’s vast fields of goldenrod. She has also outfitted individual thistle plants, which provide a home for immature butterflies, with temperature- and humidity-monitoring equipment so that she can compare them with plants in an urban setting.
Sarah Diamond nets a red admiral butterfly, and undergraduate student Emily Makowski prepares an enclosure for housing the butterfly. Red admirals are being negatively impacted by the combined stress of climate change and urbanization. Photo by Mike Sands.
A red admiral butterfly caught at the University Farm. The butterflies are brought to Diamond’s lab, where their growth and development are assessed in environmental chambers that mimic the impacts of climate change and urbanization. Photo by Mike Sands.
“It’s like we have a field station, but with farm equipment and people who know how to run it,” says Jean Burns, assistant professor of biology, who studies biological invasions and the formation of plant communities. The farm staff has done everything from dig trenches to build deer fences around her research plots, she says.
Assistant Professor Mike Benard, who holds the George B. Mayer Chair in Urban and Environmental Studies in the biology department, explores population dynamics, particularly among amphibians. He, too, has benefited from the farm’s equipment and the hard work of its staff. When he arrived at the university in 2008, he wasted no time in ordering 100 cattle troughs for use as artificial ponds. Each was six feet in diameter and weighed 90 pounds. “Within two hours of arriving, each of those ponds was moved to where it was supposed to be,” Benard says. “That, to me, is the story of the farm.”
Numerous scientists from Case Western Reserve, Cleveland Metroparks, Holden Arboretum and other universities conduct research here. Last summer—its busiest season—the farm hosted at least 40 researchers. For example, Christopher Cullis, the Francis Hobart Herrick Professor of Biology and chair of the biology department, leads a group studying the mechanisms of genetic mutation in flax plants. Holden Arboretum scientists David Burke and Kurt Smemo are examining the effects of acid rain on soil microbes and plant growth in hardwood forests. Other scientists are engaged in applied research involving food production at the Farm.
The renewed interest is partly due to the many new facilities the Farm has acquired in recent years. The Debra Ann November Research Greenhouse, a gift from Mort and Iris November, opened in 2006. Two years later, the Flora Stone Mather Alumnae Association donated funding for a teaching laboratory. A hoop house and apiary soon followed. Now, even scientists who do their research elsewhere benefit from the farm. The staff, for instance, grows tobacco plants in the greenhouse for Professor Mark Willis in the biology department. (Willis uses moths in his research, and requires tobacco plants to raise them on.)
Though they increasingly have company, resident scientists Benard and Burns conduct much of the ongoing research at the farm. (Many of Diamond’s projects are still in the planning stage.) For them, as for Locci, the farm is something of a second home. As the director puts it: “On campus, I’m ‘Dr. Locci.’ Here, I’m ‘Ana.’ There are no doctors here.”
On a sunny day in early September, the greenhouse was oven-like. A group of small potted roses, some visibly wilting, covered one table. Their parched state, it turned out, was intentional. Jennifer Murphy, a graduate student in Burns’ lab, is investigating what factors enable an introduced plant to proliferate and thus become an invasive species.
Graduate student Jennifer Murphy (left) and Assistant Professor Jean Burns (right) monitor an experiment at Valley Ridge Farm (the lower farm). Burns and Murphy are studying the role of soil conditions, including soil microbiota, in governing invasibility. Photo by Mike Sands.
Multiflora rose, the subject of her experiment, is native to eastern Asia and was introduced in this country in the mid-19th century as a “living fence.” It has since spread throughout the eastern United States, and to some areas of the farm, crowding out native plants. Murphy has planted the invaders and given some of them very little water. She will use the results to test her hypothesis that invasive multiflora rose has a high tolerance for drought and crowding.
Murphy also suspects that the invasive rose may be encouraging more of its own kind by altering the bacteria and fungi that inhabit the surrounding soil. So members of the lab plan to collect soil from the roots of multiflora and of native roses. They will then plant native roses in multiflora soil and vice versa. As the experiment draws to a close, the researchers will examine how the plants react. The results should further understanding of the role soil biota can play in plant invasions. In addition, the two multiflora rose experiments could have practical implications for controlling invaders.
While Burns works primarily with plants and Benard generally focuses on amphibians, their investigations sometimes align in interesting ways. The two scientists’ research groups are both planning climate change studies that involve a good deal of snow shoveling, for instance. In Burns’ lab, graduate student Anna Osvaldsson is leading a project to determine whether the delicate perennial flowers known as spring ephemerals, many of which are found on the farm, will be frozen out by climate change.
Anna Osvaldsson tends her climate change experiment at Squire Valleevue Farm. Anna is a graduate student in the Burns lab, studying the effects of changing snow cover in the winter on spring ephemeral plants. Photo by Mike Sands.
“The snow acts like a nice warm blanket,” Burns says. “So, paradoxically, as it gets warmer and there is less snow, we expect the ground to freeze more, and we expect that we might get more mortality on our native plants.” The researchers will shovel snow onto some plants and off of others to determine whether that hypothesis is supported.
Put them in the ground and Burns’ experimental subjects tend to stay put. That is not the case with Benard’s organisms of choice, at least most of the time. Benard often works with wood frogs. These unusual creatures, which are abundant near the farm’s vernal pools, survive the winter by freezing solid. Benard has already found that the warmer winters climate change is bringing to the region cause female wood frogs to produce fewer eggs. He suspects those warmer winters also deplete the wood frogs’ energy reserves. If the frozen frogs are thawed too much or too often, their metabolism should speed up, causing them to burn energy. To find out how that might affect the creatures, over the winter Benard will place wood frogs in small round pens he has set up in the woods. Then, as in Burns’ experiment, the shoveling will begin. Afterward, Benard will compare the frogs that were buried in snow with those whose snow cover was cleared away.
Those pens are already proving useful for a different project, another in which Benard’s and Burns’ interests overlap. Ohio is home to a large population of invasive night crawlers. (The Great Lakes region has no native earthworms.) They drag leaf litter from the surface, pull it into the soil and eat it.
“These invasive earthworms are spreading around here, and one of the things they do is reduce the amount of leaf litter that’s on the forest floor,” Benard says. That may be a problem for the wood frogs, which eat the tasty invertebrates that live in dry leaves. So one of Benard’s graduate students, Hilary Rollins, populated the enclosures with frogs and differing quantities of leaf litter. Though the small frogs are difficult to see among the leaves—they are tan with a streak of black eyeliner—Benard is a master at finding them. Later in the fall, Rollins and Benard began to take them from their pens and measure their growth. If the data suggest that their size varies with the amounts of leaf litter, this will be an indication that invasive earthworms may be taking a toll on local wood frogs.
Burns notes that these same worms may interact with another invader, a plant called garlic mustard. Garlic mustard contains allelochemicals, which stem the growth of co-occurring plants.
Mike Benard and his graduate students gather data from experiments on tadpoles raised in artificial ponds at the farm. From left: Kacey Dananay, Hilary Rollins, Benard and Mini Guo. Photo by Mike Sands.
“They can have really dramatic effects on other plants,” Burns says. “They’re basically poison.” Burns wondered if the worms, through their eating habits, might be compounding the spread of garlic mustard’s allelochemicals.
The green frog (Rana clamitans) is one of the most common amphibians at the University Farm. Assistant Professor Mike Benard uses green frog tadpoles to teach students in his herpetology class how to conduct experiments. Photo by Mike Sands.
To find out, members of her lab collected garlic mustard leaves from the farm and sprinkled them in pots seeded with a native plant, mayapple. Some pots were populated with night crawlers and others were not. Thus far, the worms have not influenced the mayapples’ reaction to garlic mustard, but Burns says the experiment will take several years to yield results because mayapples are long-lived. Related projects are likely to follow.
“We understand very little about the effects of earthworms on our native plant communities,” she says. “It’s kind of a wide-open question.”
The farm—with its varied habitats of hemlock and beech forests, primary forest, restored prairie, ponds and former farmland—is full of unanswered questions. Getting students interested in asking those questions, and teaching them how to go about answering them, is another area that Locci has emphasized as director. In 2013, 19 different classes, on subjects ranging from geology to entomology to engineering, took advantage of the farm.
On a Tuesday afternoon early this fall, undergraduates in Benard’s herpetology class gathered around a small pond for a lesson in weighing tadpoles. It was a skill they would need for a subsequent experiment comparing the growth rates of tadpoles in two different ponds. The experiment would give the students experience in forming and testing a hypothesis.
“How many folks have held little live tadpoles before?” Benard asked the class. Five or six hands went up. “Were they alive when you were done?” he asked, to laughter. Benard gathered several green frog tadpoles from traps he’d set in the shallows of the pond and poured them into a water-filled plastic tub. He pre-weighed another, smaller container of water. Then, delicately scooping up a tadpole with a tiny net, he placed it gently on a gloved finger. He tilted his finger slightly to shake off a water droplet—its weight could throw off the results—and slipped the tadpole into the smaller container, which was still on the scale. “Be careful,” he said. “It’s very easy to break off their tails.”
Before long, Benard’s students had taken over. He looked on happily. “They’re not just looking at pictures of animals on slides,” he said. “They’re actually handling them and seeing how they move.” Periodically a group of students flagged Benard down to ask about an unusual find. Juvenile newts show up in the traps, as do leeches and predatory water insects, intent on eating tadpoles. These serendipitous finds allow Benard to share his knowledge of the broader ecosystem. Did his students know that bullfrogs sometimes eat fledgling redwing blackbirds? Or that eastern red-spotted newts can choose to live primarily either on land or in water as adults?
Many undergraduates conduct their senior capstone projects or other research at the farm and come to know the place nearly as well as scientists like Benard. Drake Sweet, a senior biology major with a minor in environmental studies, obtained funding from the National Science Foundation for a project involving native plants and the soil they grow in. Plants cause changes in the biological composition of the soil, which in turn affect any new plants that grow there. Sweet, with Burns’ help, is running an experiment to compare the effects related plants have on one another through the soil with the effects distantly related plants have. Rows of Sweet’s pots run the length of the greenhouse. “It’s a very large, year-long project,” Burns says.
Undergraduate researcher Drake Sweet is studying how biological changes that plants cause in the composition of the soil affect new plants that grow nearby. He obtained funding from the National Science Foundation for this project. Photo by Mike Sands.
Locci hopes to bring even more students into the fold. This fall, for the first time, a dedicated bus runs daily to and from campus. New Student Orientation this year included a visit to the farm, complete with 44 seminars on every conceivable pursuit here, including much of the research.
If Locci has her way, there will soon be even more research to share at Orientation. Her wish list is extensive. She’s hoping to bring in goats to study their ability to keep invasive plants at bay. She’d like to try introducing tilapia into the farm’s hydroponic system. She plans to convert former farmland into organic hay fields, for research as well as to produce hay for the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.
Above all, she hopes to wire the entire farm with high-tech devices called repliers. These antennae could give researchers a large range of abilities: to examine microclimates remotely in real time; track water levels in the ponds; measure the temperature, humidity and other characteristics of soil in the forests; and continually monitor bluebird boxes and collared animals.
“All the technology exists. It’s just a matter of funding,” Locci says. She glances up at the surrounding trees from the driver’s seat of a four-wheeler as she steers down a rutted farm road. “I think we’d really upscale the level and quality of research here.”
Andrea Appleton is a freelance writer in Baltimore.