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Collectors of the UNC Herbarium
Information compiled in May 2006 by
Carol Ann McCormick,
Assistant Curator of the University of North Carolina Herbarium
Lisa Marie Giencke
(b. 1982)
Lisa Giencke worked in the University of North
Carolina Herbarium from 2002 - 2007 in several capacities. She deposited
about 400 specimens (most from Battle Park in Orange County, NC), and
annoted many existing specimens in our fern collection. Ms. Giencke's
greatest legacy to the Herbarium was her expertise in computer technology:
she piloted the conversion of our data to the SPECIFY database and authored
the Herbarium's website.
Ms. Giencke was born in Kandiyohi County,
Minnesota, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill with a B.A. in Biology in 2003. She was the winner of the Francis J. LeClair Award, given annually to
an outstanding graduating senior for academic excellence in biology with an
emphasis in plant sciences.
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Lisa
Giencke
photograph by Laura Cotterman, 2003
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Ms. Giencke was the first Mary McKee Felton Herbarium Intern. Her
project for the Internship involved the fern and fern allies. Major taxonomic
changes have affected the naming and arranging of southeastern United States
ferns and fern allies at the familial, generic, and specific levels, with
numerous new species named in recent years and many name changes reflecting
new understanding of higher level relationships. For instance, there is now
general consensus that the genus Lycopodium (the clubmosses) in
eastern North America actually represents at least three, and probably more
like seven to nine genera, as reflected in the Flora of North America
volume published in 1993. The nine herbarium cases of specimens of ferns and
fern allies at the University of North Carolina Herbarium had not kept up
with the times, and speciens of some species were filed under two or even
three diffent names. Giencke worked with Curator Alan Weakley to correctly
identify, annotate, and rearrange the specimens according to the more modern
treaments. Additionally, Giencke entered the label and locality data into the
Herbarium's database (1). As a result, anyone can now access NCU's fern and
fern ally collection via the NCU ATLAS to
generate a map of the taxa and to view the label data from specimens.
In 2004 Ms. Giencke continued to work in the Herbarium on the Flora of
Virginia Project, then in 2005 shifted her primary focus to the flora of Battle Park. On July 1, 2004, at the
request of James Moeser, Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, the North Carolina Botanical Garden assumed responsibility for
Battle Park, a wonderful wooded tract on the east side of campus and downhill
from the Coker Arboretum. The tract includes one of the most awe-inspiring
legacies of the University, which, furthermore, symbolizes the important
connection between nature and art: the stone amphitheater known as Forest
Theatre. Although not a pristine forest, much of the 93-acre Battle Park
consists of forest that predates European settlement in the area (1740). The
park is named for Kemp Plummer Battle, president of UNC from 1876 to 1891,
who laid out the original trail system and spent many happy and contemplative
hours within the forest (2).
Giencke began the botanical inventory of Battle Park by scouring the UNC
Herbarium for any specimens collected there, then entered these specimens
into the herbarium's database. Then, together with Dr. David Vandermast (Elon
University) and Dr. Peter White (North Carolina Botanical Garden), additional
specimens were collected in the Park, and a complete checklist of the plants
of the park was compiled. Copies of their report on the history and flora of
Battle Park have been deposited at the North Carolina Botanical Garden, as
well as in the Couch Biology Library and the North Carolina Collection of
Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Label
information on all specimens held by NCU collected from Battle Park is
available at NCU ATLAS.
In 2007 Giencke moved to southern California to
participate in the ecological
restoration of San Clemente Island. San Clemente Island, the southernmost
of the eight California Channel Islands. It lies 55 nautical miles (nm) south
of Long Beach and 68 nm west of San Diego. The island is approximately 21 nm
long and is 4-1/2 nm across at its widest point. Since 1934, the island has
been owned and operated by various naval commands. A core component of the
effort to restore the native habitat of the island is to clear exotic
vegetation and to plant native shrub species. To aid in the effort, the Navy
has established a native plant nursery where shrubs are grown and then
transplanted to sites on the Island that lack native shrub cover and have low
habitat diversity (3, 4).
In 2010 Giencke completed a Masters degree in
Environmental & Forest Biology at the SUNY College of Environmental
Science and Forestry. She studied the spread of beech back disease in a 2 ha
plot at the Huntington Wildlife Forest near Newcomb, NY. Her thesis is titled
“Spatiotemporal dynamics of an Adirondack forest.”
In 2011 Giencke became the Plant Ecology Lead
Technician at the W. Jones Ecology
Research Center at Ichauway.
SOURCES
1. Weakley, Alan S. (2003) Lisa Giencke hired as
first Mary McKee Felton Herbarium Intern. North Carolina Botanical Garden
Newsletter, issue of September-October, 2003.
2. Cotterman, Laura (2006) Battle Park, http://ncbg.unc.edu/pages/39/,
accessed on 14 May 2006.
3. Anonymous (undated), http://www.scisland.org/aboutsci/aboutsci.php,
accessed on 14 May 2006.
4. Anonymous (undated), http://www.socalrangecomplexeis.com/FactSheets\HabitatRestorationFactSheet_FINAL.pdf,
accessed on 14 May 2006.
   Curriculum North Carolina UNC
In Ecology Botanical Garden Biology Department
University of North Carolina
Herbarium
CB# 3280, Coker Hall
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3280
phone: (919) 962-6931
fax: (919) 962-6930
email: mccormickATSIGNunc.edu
Last Updated: 29 June 2011
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