Staff Spotlight - Anthony Brach

Anthony Brach is a Senior Curatorial Technician for the vascular collections. From 1993 until joining the HUH staff in 2012, Anthony served as an Editor of the Flora of China, as a staff member of Missouri Botanical Garden (MO) while based at HUH. Anthony is from Rochester, NY, and he and his wife Ying raised three sons who went on to study and practice medicine and pharmaceutical care. Anthony enjoys visiting parks and hiking with family, gardening, classical music, and genealogy.

When did you first became interested in botany?
When I was just a child, my father took my brothers and me to local parks, and later, hiking in the Finger Lakes region and Adirondacks. He taught us the names of plants that he recognized, and we identified unfamiliar flowering plants and trees that we came across. I helped my dad with our garden, grapevine and raspberry patch, and my mom with our house plants like spider-lilies and African violets. I was amazed by the variety of plants pictured in nursery catalogs and grew unusual plants like Dionaea, Darlingtonia, and Stapelia. When my parents took us on family trips, including a car trip across Canada to the Rockies, I was fascinated by plants new to us along the way. As a Scout pursuing my Botany merit badge and as a member of Burroughs-Audobon Nature Club, I enjoyed learning more about botany, and inventorying plants along a transect at the Club’s property (Fishers, New York). For my Eagle service project, familiar with Zurich Bog (Wayne Co.) and its rare plants (including orchids, Drosera, and Sarracenia) from visits to the bog, I improved the raised trail with my Scout troop, to protect sensitive habitats.

Where did you gain your educational foundation?
I majored in Biology and minored in religious studies at Iona College. As a graduate student in Environmental & Forest Biology at the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science & Forestry (SUNY-ESF), taking Systematic Botany and Plant Ecology courses enhanced my understanding of taxonomy and ecology. I assisted botany lab students when my major professor was away on sabbatical. After completing my PhD, I learned about the flora of China while editing family treatments, testing keys, managing the Project’s website, and creating a digital version of the Flora and interactive identification keys.

Did you have a mentor(s)?
I have appreciated guidance and advice from my parents Paul and Cathy, my major professor Dudley Raynal (SUNY-ESF), my supervisors for the Flora of China Project - Ihsan Al-Shehbaz (MO) and Dave Boufford (A), and others.

How did you get to where you are today?
During summer vacations from high school, I was an Environmental Conservation counselor at Massawepie Scout Camps in the Adirondacks. In association with the Congregation of Christian Brothers during my Iona years, I taught in Gbarnga, Liberia and the New York City area. As a research assistant during my graduate studies, I investigated ecological responses of forest herbs as part of the Experimental Watershed Liming Study, and responses of ferns to altered irradiance and N fertilization, as part of an ‘acid rain’ study, the Adirondack Manipulation and Modeling Project. Each year at SUNY-ESF, I helped plot and summarize data from the National Atmospheric Deposition Program site at Huntington Forest in the Adirondacks. From 1993 to 2012, I was an Editor for MO for the Flora of China, and then I joined the curatorial team here.

When did you first become involved with the HUH?
I first became involved with the Herbaria as a Research Associate in July 1993, when I started editing the Flora of China. Although a MO staff member, I was based here since this was one of the Editorial Centers for the Flora, with the excellent, complementary resources of the sizeable Chinese collections in the Herbaria and botany libraries. In 2012, when the Flora neared completion, I joined the HUH staff first as a digitizer for the North American Lichens & Bryophyte Digitization Project and subsequently as a curatorial assistant for the vascular herbaria. Upon the retirement of a senior curatorial associate, I assumed several of her responsibilities for the vascular collections, resulting in transitioning to my current role as a senior curatorial technician.

Do you recall the first time you felt like your research enlightened others?
When I started my graduate studies, mentioning ‘helicopter liming’ of an Adirondack watershed (Woods Lake, NY) was a good segue into telling relatives and friends about my research. Conversations helped them realize that environmental challenges like ‘acid rain’ are complex and require careful scientific investigation and problem-solving, and led to interesting discussions about conservation and restoration ecology.

What has been your most exciting discovery?
During my graduate research, I found that the understory herb Oxalis acetosella (see photo below) responded positively to liming, increasing its growth, i.e., leaf biomass and area with higher Ca and lower K concentrations in leaves, while Huperzia lucidula decreased stem elongation and bulbil production. Here in our area, in May 2012, I was surprised to find an albino root-sprout of Ailanthus altissima growing at a busy intersection in Jamaica Plain, just east of the Arnold Arboretum. It was completely pink in May, and then in July 2012, it had white mature leaves and a pink-striped, white stem (see photo below). 

What is something that you have found particularly challenging?
After exclusively transcribing data from home at the beginning of the covid pandemic, starting in June 2020, I was able to schedule periodic visits to the Herbaria for essential on-site work. This required strict adherence to the university’s safety protocols and weekly testing, and prioritization of tasks, since on-site visits were limited to a scheduled time for one day per week at first, which later expanded to two days, then three days, and finally to our current workweek. In coordination with curatorial team members for their own on-site visits, I froze incoming shipments (to prevent potential insect problems), processed returned loans, gifts, and exchanges of specimens from other herbaria, checked insect traps, photographed specimens as requested by botanists for their remote studies, and I attached barcodes and photographed the next set of project-related specimens for transcription from home. Now that the Herbaria have returned to regular operations, with more than five million specimens in our care, our team continues to balance our many curatorial activities.

Do you have a specimen that is the most cherished?
Regularly, I find new favorites, but here are two to share here. While preparing for a class visit, I came across this striking specimen of Pelargonium quercifolium from South Africa, with maroon-striped, pink flowers and oak-shaped, softly pubescent leaves. And while digitizing ferns for the All Asia Project, I came across this specimen of Lygodium dimorphum from Papua New Guinea, collected by Wayne Takeuchi, dimorphic having differing sterile and fertile fronds, and essentially trimorphic having even further dissected, lace-like apical leaves.

What do you like the most about your job?
I enjoy seeing the immense diversity of our worldwide plant collections. It is rewarding to come across specimens, which have retained their color, such as Lilium, Delphinium, Lupinus, Primula, and Gentiana, and amazingly diverse pteridophytes. Also, it is fun to take a ‘step back in time,’ reflecting upon historic label data that captured the moment of a plant’s collection.

What would you like the next generation to seek out?
Remember to look at the ‘big picture’ – a species is more than its molecules; learn about its morphological characters, phenology, habitat, and interactions with other species in its ecosystem. Test and develop interactive keys for identification. Newly available data and images from ongoing digitization projects offer opportunities for collaborative science and curation. With duplicate specimens housed in herbaria worldwide, shared data for new determinations become available to other herbaria and to us. Thousands of specimens await identification, species distributions await analysis, and new species await discovery. Long-term planning for curation of herbaria will continue to enable studies for better understanding Earth’s plants and their ecological relationships. In collaboration with other disciplines, herbaria can provide solutions to sustaining biodiversity, and protecting and restoring the world’s ecosystems.

Is there anything else you would like to share?
An interesting coincidence – I met one of my cousins Dr. Walter Macior (1926-2007), professor emeritus of Akron University and a Franciscan (Fr. Lazarus), at a Symposium at Missouri Botanical Garden, for the first time in 1994 and in following years. Walter is known for his studies of pollination ecology of Pedicularis, including in the mountains of China.