Welcome to the Arboretum blog
You may be asking yourself “Why do Vanderbilt’s trees have a blog?” and “Who’s actually writing that blog since trees can’t actually type?”
The answer to the first question is that we thought it would be nice to have a place where we could write more than is possible in a Facebook post or Twitter tweet. Yes, there is the arboretum website, but we hope that this blog can be a bit more informal and “in the moment”. We plan to have about two blog posts per month: one written by the arboretum crew and another that is a “guest” blog where people who know or care about Vanderbilt’s trees can share their thoughts.
As for who is actually blogging, for this post it’s Steve Baskauf, the arboretum’s “communications coordinator”. I used to call myself the arboretum’s webmaster, but now that we have a social media presence I decided that the title should be expanded a little bit.
I thought that it might be worthwhile in this first post to reflect a little bit about how the way that people learn about the arboretum’s trees has evolved over time. I’m not going to talk extensively about the history of the arboretum, since you can read about that on the website at http://vanderbilt.edu/trees/history . Instead, I want to focus on how evolving technology has made that learning easier.
The earliest known technology for informing the public about Vanderbilt’s trees are the metal or plastic labels that are attached to many of the trees. You may be surprised to know that the tree-labeling effort has been going on for more than 60 years. “The Real Dirt”, a history of the Vanderbilt Garden Club (Sharon Hogge, 1998, available in the Vanderbilt libraries) details the club’s efforts to inventory and label the trees. At first, cost was a real issue, but in 1968 Mrs. James Mapheus Smith donated $15,000 to fund an endowment to support tree labeling. Since that time, there has been a concerted effort to keep the labeling going, with the end result that a significant fraction of the trees have been labeled.
The second major effort made use of that great technology, the printing press. In the early 1980’s, Michell Thurmond (an undergrad) suggested that there should be a book about the trees. A group of contributors that included faculty, staff, and students worked for several years to produce a beautiful little book, The Trees of Vanderbilt, which was published in 1994 by the university and for many years was sold in the campus bookstore. (The book in its entirety can now be read on the arboretum website at http://vanderbilt.edu/trees/ofvanderbilt.) I got a copy of the book when I first came to campus as an ecology grad student in the mid-1990s and used it during my explorations of campus.
One problem with a paper book is that it quickly goes out of date. It also is limited in the amount and type of material that can be presented. In 2005, I suggested to Pam Sevy (the arboretum director) and Judson Newbern (Deputy Vice Chancellor for Facilities & Environmental Affairs and longtime champion and protector of trees on campus) that it would be cool to create an online tree tour that would lead users from one tree to the next. The tour would show users where the tree was on a map, show pictures of the species, and have text describing the tree. They gave me their blessing and I laboriously constructed the maps and web pages manually, starting with data from the campus GIS tree layer. Originally, I envisioned that people would run the tour from a CD on their laptops. However, when I tried it, it didn’t take me very long to realize that the technology wasn’t right for the job – I got tired of carrying the laptop after about 5 minutes. Then I considered making a video that would run on an iPod. But before I got started on that, I saw my first iPhone and immediately realized that was the way to deliver the tour.
Since that time I’ve been working on making the tree tours work on all kinds of devices, including phones, iPads, and conventional computers. The main campus tour and Peabody campus tours are online already and can be accessed at http://vanderbilt.edu/trees/tours. We have already started working on a “Trail of Giants” tour and eventually, we plan to have a tour focused on history and another that winds through the medical center. There is no app to download – just open the URI for the tour or any tree on it on your device. We have also “modernized” the labels of the trees by adding QR codes that allow people to discover the tours by scanning the codes on their phones to load the tree’s web page.
The ability to associate a particular tree with a URI not only means that you can load the URI into a web browser and see a web page about the tree, as happens when you move through the online tree tour. The URI also provides a means to unambiguously identify that tree. For example, a number of the trees in the arboretum now are a part of the global record of biodiversity at GBIF (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility) and are linked to their record in the arboretum by their unique URI. To see an example of one of those records, go to http://www.gbif.org/occurrence/930743247.
We are excited about the ways that people can use technology to interact with the trees of the arboretum in interesting ways and we encourage you to follow the arboretum on Facebook or Twitter. However, it’s still great to just turn all of the devices off and wander around enjoying the beauty of the trees just like Bishop McTyeire did over 100 years ago.
Steve Baskauf is a senior lecturer in the Biological Sciences Department at Vanderbilt University. He can be contacted at steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu.