Lunch with a Scientist is an ongoing monthly lecture series at Cedar Creek. Each month, scientists present a general-audience lecture about their work at or related to Cedar Creek and take questions from the audience.
The series has been running since January 2019 as an in-person program. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it was shifted online in April 2020, from which point recordings are available. Programs take place on the second Tuesday of each month (11:30am central time), either in-person at Cedar Creek, via zoom, or both. Details about speakers and delivery mode are at
https://cbs.umn.edu/cedarcreek/public-programs/lunch-scientistNovember's Lunch with a Scientist explored how to use long-term ecological data to understand forest responses to global change. The analysis of herbarium collections offers a novel opportunity to evaluate the effects of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and nitrogen deposition on plant and fungal carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) status over historical increases in both global change drivers. In this talk, Dr. Peter Kennedy discussed two analyses of a 14 decade dataset of plant and fungal C and N content based on leaf and mushroom collections from the Twin Cities metro area. He also discussed a multi-decade plant and fungal dataset from Switzerland examining the effects of tree masting on mushroom production and diversity.