Anna enjoyed the talk so much that she asked Becky if we could share it on Plant//People. Enjoy!
Becky Barak is a Ph.D. candidate in Northwestern University and Chicago Botanic Garden's Graduate Program in Plant Biology and Conservation. She gave an "ignite" talk at this August's Ecological Society of America meeting in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Ignite talks are only 5 minutes, and slides advance automatically every 15 seconds. Becky, and others in her session, described their research using only the 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language. This fun challenge was inspired by xkcd's "Upgoer Five" cartoon. Anna enjoyed the talk so much that she asked Becky if we could share it on Plant//People. Enjoy! Thanks for coming. You can write about this on your phone. I come from a big city in a middle state. My area was once covered in a group of growing green things called a grass land, with tall grasses and wild flowers. The grass grew so high, they said, that it would hide a man and his horse. Many animals lived there too. But much of the grass land was lost when people starting using the land to grow food and build houses. They broke up the land under the growing green things, and so much of what made the land special was lost. The land had "memory" made up of lots of things living in the dirt, and bits of growing green things that and wait for the right time to grow up. But when the land was broken, much of the memory was lost. All was not lost. Some small areas of the old grass land are still here, and we can visit them, and we need to continue to work to keep them safe. .But since so much grass land was lost, people are trying to build new grass lands, in cities, places where people used to grow food, and in places where people get together for meetings. People usually make new grass lands by putting tiny brown things in the ground. The tiny brown things are very important. They look like nothing big, just a tiny brown thing. But sometimes you leave one, come back, and there is a little piece breaking though where there used to be nothing. If it is warm enough, and wet enough (but not too warm or too wet) the tiny brown thing can grow into a big green thing, like a grass, a tree, or a flower. Different kinds of tiny brown things turn into different kinds of growing green things. The idea with making new grass land is that if we put the right tiny brown things into a new place, they will grow and make a grass land. But, new grass lands are different from the old ones. They don't have memory, so people have to build up the memory. Because of this, they usually have fewer growing green things growing together. Having lots of growing green things together in a group is important, because it means that the group can do more jobs than if there were only a few kinds of growing green things. Areas with lots of kinds of growing green things can feed and give homes to many kinds of animals, and keep out growing green things that can take over an area, and can bend, not break, when something bad happens. My job, with a lot of my friends, is to find out how we can make new grass lands with lots of different kinds of growing green things together. I do this in a few ways. I have a few things I want to know. First, I look at the family tree of old grass lands, and found that lots of branches are missing from new grass lands. So we might want to think about adding in tiny brown things for these kinds of green things. This might help make new grass lands more like old grass lands. I also try to learn about the tiny brown things themselves. Not all the brown things will grow into green things. Some will stay tiny brown things forever, or until someone, somewhere eats them. I want to know if we can figure out which tiny brown things will send out a shoot that can grow into a green thing, and which ones will not by looking at things like the size and weight of the tiny brown thing. I also look inside the brown things with a special machine that doctors can use to look inside of you. Big green things start tiny. I really hope that my work will also help us learn about how tiny things turn big, and that I will be able to help make new grass lands that can be around for a long long time. And if I can do that, I am pretty sure they're going to make me a doctor.
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