Carnegie Science Center Podcast

Dr. Cynthia Morton Carnegie Museum of Natural History Curator of Botany   Assuring Urban Forest Health and Sustainability via Tree Genetic Diversity   Follow along with the slide show here! As a botanist, Dr. Cynthia Morton, curator of botany at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, has worked locally and internationally to collect specimens for phylogenetic analysis of molecular and morphological data. The range of projects include redefining the citrus family, constructing genomic maps, cleaning ground water, and investigating park and nursery tree genetics. Her work in 2008 compared the level of genetic variation in London Plane trees already existing in the Pittsburgh area with trees of the same species currently available from three commercial nurseries. The genetic diversity was far greater in the older urban tree samples compared to the nursery samples, indicating that the nursery industry has been selectively cloning to produce new trees. While cloning trees is in itself a benign practice, doing so o