From The Arizona State University
4.4.24
Lauren Whitby
lauren.whitby@asu.edu
University partnership with Boyce Thompson Arboretum spans several innovative projects
Purple blooms in the Hummingbird and Butterfly Garden at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum. Photo courtesy Meghan Finnerty/ASU
Earth Day is every day for the Boyce Thompson Arboretum, but this year is especially significant as it celebrates its 100th anniversary. Arizona State University is working with the arboretum on several innovative projects to document Arizona’s oldest and largest botanical garden.
The partnership with ASU is symbiotic, to use a biology term. The arboretum provides one-of-a-kind, hands-on experiences with desert plants, wildlife and ecosystems, and in turn, students, faculty and staff at ASU have helped develop resources and research that will keep the desert oasis blooming for centuries to come.
From desert plant research and conservation, to oral histories and archives, to immersive digital learning and advanced GIS mapping, current projects and programs span across the humanities, natural sciences and social sciences disciplines.
Decades of stories to tell
As part of the centennial celebration, the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies public history program partnered with the Desert Humanities Initiative to document oral histories and digital archives of the arboretum.
The project, led by Associate Professor Mark Tebeau, Program Coordinator Erin Craft, graduate student Holly Barnard and alumni Taylor Bangerter and Mike Wohl, gave students the opportunity to interview dozens of employees, board members, volunteers and patrons of Boyce Thompson.
Mark Tebeau presents at the arboretum on March 19 on his team’s research. Photo courtesy Meghan Finnerty/ASU
“What (the students) spoke about often was how almost every single person we interviewed really was connected. So not just, this is my job, this is what I do, but this is my place,” Craft said.
“And they all had stories about their favorite areas of the arboretum or the plants that they loved.”
Mayor of Superior, Arizona, Mila Besich, who was interviewed as part of the project, shared her love for the arboretum and her fond memories of growing up nearby.
She recounted the Telegraph Fire of 2021 and how she was part of the response team that contacted Sen. Mark Kelly to make sure the arboretum was saved. The fire lasted almost a month and burned over 180,000 acres, the second largest wildfire in the U.S. for that year.
Students also worked with the Boyce Thompson library to create a digital archive of its many artifacts.
“Anytime we could be at the arboretum and we weren’t conducting oral histories, we were in there creating a finding aid + getting a grasp on the huge amount of stuff that was back there,” Wohl said.
The students dug through thousands of documents, including botanical literature, educational posters, personal records, letters, maps and endless stacks of slides and photographs. Along the way, they discovered even more stories about the arboretum, many of which outlived those collected through the oral histories.
For example, they read about Fred Gibson, who was an instructor of plant pathology and was offered the job of leading the arboretum by Colonel Boyce Thompson in 1924, when the arboretum was founded.
This ongoing project has provided hands-on experience to students interested in pursuing careers as archivists and museum curators.
“It’s on all my resumes that I’ve been sending out. I’ve got a couple applications to not only archives administrations, but some history consulting firms. I plan on using BTA for that,” Wohl said.
Future work will involve mapping human-environment interactions and creating public-facing art programming to highlight the arboretum.
“Boyce Thompson is at the heart of Pinal County, a county that is rural, poor and doesn’t get a lot of love,” Craft said. “It’s fundamental to that county and its history. And so documenting this place is vital to understanding not just Boyce Thompson, but its surroundings and its relationship to them.”
Immersive technology for increased access
In addition to the historical archive, an interdisciplinary team at ASU is currently creating an immersive online course exploring the history, ecology, geology and botany of Boyce Thompson Arboretum and the town of Superior.
With funding from Shelley Esque and Lenni Benson, they will use place-based software to create high-definition, 360-degree digital learning environments.
Students will be able to navigate through the digital space embedded with layers of textual, video and audio resources. They will engage with the platform to explain and account for how plants, humans, animals, climates and technologies have shaped the area’s history.
The Smith Interpretive Center Greenhouse at Boyce Thompson Arboretum. Photo courtesy Meghan Finnerty/ASU
The project team includes Professor Jason Bruner, Associate Professor Evan Berry, Professor Steven Semken, Associate Professor Erika Lynne Hanson, Graduate Teaching Assistant Luke Ramsey and Regents Professor Jonathan Bate. Together, they bring expertise in geology, art, history, sustainability and environmental humanities.
“There’s just a lot to think about in a pretty tight area geographically speaking,” Bruner said.
“It makes sense to try and get a botanist and a geologist and an artist and historian and so on together, and sort of in one way model for students how to think together about what it means to be in a place and to think with these different kinds of disciplinary tools and perspectives, appreciating different kinds of connections that each of any of those disciplines or practices and methods would bring.”
Semken, an ethnogeologist and geoscience education researcher whose work focuses on place-based and culturally informed geoscience education, has led geology hikes for several years as a volunteer at the arboretum.
“If you look at Superior as a whole, it’s got interesting and instructive geology in terms of the fact that a large piece of Arizona’s geologic history is encapsulated in the rocks in that area,” Semken said.
“Both places are geologically illustrative and rich, and my role is to help expand that place-based education, develop it, assess it and teach it better.”
The course will be offered to students through The College’s culture, technology and environment bachelor’s degree program, which launched for immersion students in fall 2023 and will launch online in fall 2024. The digital environment will also be made available to Boyce Thompson employees and volunteers for training and continuing education.
“This is supposed to be a virtual, asynchronous course, so we want to create authentic virtual learning experiences out there at the arboretum and out there in the Superior area,” Semken said.
“Traditionally, place-based education has been actually outdoors, or physically in person in a place, but now we are resorting more to virtual modalities to give us a chance to bring students to places where maybe they wouldn’t have been able to go before.”
A game changer for hikers and horticulturists
In coordination with the 100th anniversary, Irina Chen, Yunru Lu and Amarchandra Yadavalli, who are now graduates of ASU’s master’s program in geographic information systems (GIS), used GIS tools to map the arboretum’s grounds.
They walked the trails during the hot Arizona summer and created geographic data for features like valve boxes, filters, water features, drinking fountains and more. In total, they documented 333 items on two of the main hiking trails.
“We prioritized the type of data that they wanted to be collected, like different irrigation and electrical data. It wasn’t a lot of data, but what was collected was important,” Yadavalli said.
The web map includes detailed information on location, sources and sizes for each item and allows users to interact with features on the map, including measuring distances between points as well as adding and deleting items.
“For a student, especially in a one-year program, it’s rare to get real fieldwork experience. We usually only learn and practice in front of the computers,” Lu said.
“I didn’t know much about Boyce Thompson before this, and it’s amazing, and they were extremely helpful and passionate about the work.”
Before this project, mapping of the arboretum had not been updated since the early 2000s.
“When I began here over two years ago, I asked, as a horticulturist in the area I’m taking care of, is there a map? I’d like to know where the valves are and where the clean outs are and all of that information, and there wasn’t,” said Boyce Thompson Horticulture Program Manager Mary Villarreal. “And so just for staff, it’s a useful tool to have and have it accessible because GIS is an online program.”
The project and advanced software lay a foundation for further mapping developments, such as clearly indicating the difficulty and accessibility of hiking trails for visitors. The Benson family has funded several paid internships for students to gain fieldwork experience and take part in digital mapping of the arboretum.
Critical funding for student research
Though the arboretum has existed for 100 years, its official partnership with ASU launched only in 2022. Still, many students in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU have already benefited from the partnership, especially graduate and doctoral students who are eligible to apply for the Bernard “Bill” Benson Research Award.
Arina Melkozernova, an instructional designer at ASU, is studying sunflowers and the connection between their native place and the Indigenous peoples who have preserved them. She just passed her defense this spring for her PhD in comparative culture and language through the School of International Letters and Cultures.
“This is not about just languages of people. This is also about languages of plants,” she said. “Our mission is to preserve those gifts for the next generation.”
Guillermo Ortiz, who graduated in fall 2023 with an MS in biology, is studying lichens, a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and a photosynthesizing microbe. He is performing research at the ASU Lichen Herbarium, one of the largest collections of lichenized fungi in the U.S., and is using 3D models to track lichen growth over time.
Annie Weaver-Bryant, a third-year PhD student in environmental life sciences, is studying heat adaptation in peaches at the arboretum, where she planted 30 peach trees.
“My favorite part about growing the trees has been watching them go through all of the life stages as well as watching pollinators interact with them,” Weaver-Bryant said.
Melkozernova, Ortiz and Weaver-Bryant are each Bernard “Bill” Benson Research Award recipients, or “Benson Scholars.” On March 19, they presented their research at Discovery Day, an event that celebrated the ASU–Boyce Thompson Arboretum partnership and highlighted the research projects currently taking place.
“It’s great to see so many students benefiting already from this partnership, and it also allows us the opportunity to fulfill part of ASU’s charter, which is to assume responsibility and provide stewardship and support for our local communities,” said Kenro Kusumi, dean of natural sciences at The College.
“Boyce Thompson Arboretum is such an important part of our community, historically, biologically, geographically and otherwise, so it’s exactly in line with our mission that we support their efforts now, and we hope to continue to expand this partnership in the future.”
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The Arizona State University Tempe Campus.
The Arizona State University is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the U.S.
One of three universities governed by the Arizona Board of Regents, The Arizona State University is a member of the Association of American Universities and classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity.” The Arizona State University has more than 150,000 students attending classes, with more than 38,000 students attending online, and over 90,000 undergraduates and more nearly 20,000 postgraduates across its five campuses and four regional learning centers throughout Arizona. The Arizona State University offers 350 degree options from its 17 colleges and more than 170 cross-discipline centers and institutes for undergraduates students, as well as more than 400 graduate degree and certificate programs. The Arizona State Sun Devils compete in 26 varsity-level sports in the NCAA Division I Pac-12 Conference and is home to over 1,100 registered student organizations.
The Arizona State University ‘s charter, approved by the board of regents in 2014, is based on the New American University model created by The Arizona State University President Michael M. Crow upon his appointment as the institution’s 16th president in 2002. It defines The Arizona State University as “a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but rather by whom it includes and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves.” The model is widely credited with boosting The Arizona State University ‘s acceptance rate and increasing class size.
The university’s faculty of more than 4,700 scholars has included Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur Fellows, and National Academy of Sciences members. Additionally, among the faculty are Fulbright Program American Scholars, National Endowment for the Humanities fellows, American Council of Learned Societies fellows, members of the Guggenheim Fellowship, members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, members of National Academy of Inventors, National Academy of Engineering members and National Academy of Medicine members. The National Academies has bestowed “highly prestigious” recognition on a large number of Arizona State University faculty members.
History
The Arizona State University was established as the Territorial Normal School at Tempe on March 12, 1885, when the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature passed an act to create a normal school to train teachers for the Arizona Territory. The campus consisted of a single, four-room schoolhouse on a 20-acre plot largely donated by Tempe residents George and Martha Wilson. Classes began with 33 students on February 8, 1886. The curriculum evolved over the years and the name was changed several times; the institution was also known as Tempe Normal School of Arizona (1889–1903), Tempe Normal School (1903–1925), Tempe State Teachers College (1925–1929), Arizona State Teachers College (1929–1945), Arizona State College (1945–1958) and, by a 2–1 margin of the state’s voters, The Arizona State University in 1958.
In 1923, the school stopped offering high school courses and added a high school diploma to the admissions requirements. In 1925, the school became the Tempe State Teachers College and offered four-year Bachelor of Education degrees as well as two-year teaching certificates. In 1929, the 9th Arizona State Legislature authorized Bachelor of Arts in Education degrees as well, and the school was renamed The Arizona State Teachers College. Under the 30-year tenure of president Arthur John Matthews (1900–1930), the school was given all-college student status. The first dormitories built in the state were constructed under his supervision in 1902. Of the 18 buildings constructed while Matthews was president, six are still in use. Matthews envisioned an “evergreen campus,” with many shrubs brought to the campus, and implemented the planting of 110 Mexican Fan Palms on what is now known as Palm Walk, a century-old landmark of the Tempe campus.
During the Great Depression, Ralph Waldo Swetman was hired to succeed President Matthews, coming to The Arizona State Teachers College in 1930 from The Humboldt State Teachers College where he had served as president. He served a three-year term, during which he focused on improving teacher-training programs. During his tenure, enrollment at the college doubled, topping the 1,000 mark for the first time. Matthews also conceived of a self-supported summer session at the school at The Arizona State Teachers College, a first for the school.
1930–1989
In 1933, Grady Gammage, then president of The Arizona State Teachers College at Flagstaff, became president of The Arizona State Teachers College at Tempe, beginning a tenure that would last for nearly 28 years, second only to Swetman’s 30 years at the college’s helm. Like President Arthur John Matthews before him, Gammage oversaw the construction of several buildings on the Tempe campus. He also guided the development of the university’s graduate programs; the first Master of Arts in Education was awarded in 1938, the first Doctor of Education degree in 1954 and 10 non-teaching master’s degrees were approved by the Arizona Board of Regents in 1956. During his presidency, the school’s name was changed to Arizona State College in 1945, and finally to The Arizona State University in 1958. At the time, two other names were considered: Tempe University and State University at Tempe. Among Gammage’s greatest achievements in Tempe was the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed construction of what is Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium/ASU Gammage. One of the university’s hallmark buildings, Arizona State University Gammage was completed in 1964, five years after the president’s (and Wright’s) death.
Gammage was succeeded by Harold D. Richardson, who had served the school earlier in a variety of roles beginning in 1939, including director of graduate studies, college registrar, dean of instruction, dean of the College of Education and academic vice president. Although filling the role of acting president of the university for just nine months (Dec. 1959 to Sept. 1960), Richardson laid the groundwork for the future recruitment and appointment of well-credentialed research science faculty.
By the 1960s, under G. Homer Durham, the university’s 11th president, The Arizona State University began to expand its curriculum by establishing several new colleges and, in 1961, the Arizona Board of Regents authorized doctoral degree programs in six fields, including Doctor of Philosophy. By the end of his nine-year tenure, The Arizona State University had more than doubled enrollment, reporting 23,000 in 1969.
The next three presidents—Harry K. Newburn (1969–71), John W. Schwada (1971–81) and J. Russell Nelson (1981–89), including and Interim President Richard Peck (1989), led the university to increased academic stature, the establishment of The Arizona State University West campus in 1984 and its subsequent construction in 1986, a focus on computer-assisted learning and research, and rising enrollment.
1990–present
Under the leadership of Lattie F. Coor, president from 1990 to 2002, The Arizona State University grew through the creation of the Polytechnic campus and extended education sites. Increased commitment to diversity, quality in undergraduate education, research, and economic development occurred over his 12-year tenure. Part of Coor’s legacy to the university was a successful fundraising campaign: through private donations, more than $500 million was invested in areas that would significantly impact the future of The Arizona State University. Among the campaign’s achievements were the naming and endowing of Barrett, The Honors College, and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts; the creation of many new endowed faculty positions; and hundreds of new scholarships and fellowships.
In 2002, Michael M. Crow became the university’s 16th president. At his inauguration, he outlined his vision for transforming The Arizona State University into a “New American University”—one that would be open and inclusive, and set a goal for the university to meet Association of American Universities criteria and to become a member. Crow initiated the idea of transforming The Arizona State University into “One university in many places”—a single institution comprising several campuses, sharing students, faculty, staff and accreditation. Subsequent reorganizations combined academic departments, consolidated colleges and schools, and reduced staff and administration as the university expanded its West and Polytechnic campuses. The Arizona State University’s Downtown Phoenix campus was also expanded, with several colleges and schools relocating there. The university established learning centers throughout the state, including The Arizona State University Colleges at Lake Havasu City and programs in Thatcher, Yuma, and Tucson. Students at these centers can choose from several Arizona State University degree and certificate programs.
During Crow’s tenure, and aided by hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, The Arizona State University began a years-long research facility capital building effort that led to the establishment of the Biodesign Institute at The Arizona State University, the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, and several large interdisciplinary research buildings. Along with the research facilities, the university faculty was expanded, including the addition of Nobel Laureates. Since 2002, the university’s research expenditures have tripled and more than 1.5 million square feet of space has been added to the university’s research facilities.
The economic downturn that began in 2008 took a particularly hard toll on Arizona, resulting in large cuts to The Arizona State University ‘s budget. In response to these cuts, The Arizona State University capped enrollment, closed some four dozen academic programs, combined academic departments, consolidated colleges and schools, and reduced university faculty, staff and administrators; however, with an economic recovery underway in 2011, the university continued its campaign to expand the West and Polytechnic Campuses, and establish a low-cost, teaching-focused extension campus in Lake Havasu City.
The Arizona State University’s research funding has almost tripled. Degree production has increased by 45 percent. And thanks to an ambitious aid program, enrollment of students from Arizona families below poverty is up 647 percent.”
In 2015, the Thunderbird School of Global Management became the fifth Arizona State University campus, as the Thunderbird School of Global Management at The Arizona State University. Partnerships for education and research with Mayo Clinic established collaborative degree programs in health care and law, and shared administrator positions, laboratories and classes at the Mayo Clinic Arizona campus.
The Beus Center for Law and Society, the new home of The Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, opened in fall 2016 on the Downtown Phoenix campus, relocating faculty and students from the Tempe campus to the state capital.
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