The temperature outside may be chilly, but the air is warm and moist inside the Williams Conservatory on the west end of the University of Wyoming campus. This is because Williams Conservatory is home to hundreds of tropical plant species that need a moderate humid climate to survive.
The conservatory opened in 1994 and is named after Louis and Terua Williams, who made the conservatory’s construction possible. Louis Williams received his bachelors and masters degrees in botany from UW and his Ph.D. from Washington State University.
Inside the conservatory are a number of rooms where faculty and students conduct research like genetic testing on brassicas, a type of mustard plant, according to Kim Glidden, a greenhouse assistant.
Dane Miller, a graduate student, has been using the conservatory for his thesis work. Miller is focused on botany and is studying fossilized conifer cones from the Snowmass, Colo. area.
“I am interested in how the morphology of the cones has changed through time, as well as the composition of the forest,” Miller said. “Very little is known about the forest ecosystems at the high elevations in the Rocky Mountains.” Because of erosion at lower elevations it is rare to find an intact paleobotanical site at high elevations, he said.
Miller’s work required him to “build a large modern reference collection of conifer cones to examine the morphology and understand differences in the taxonomy between species.”
While Miller said his work does not directly relate to the Williams Conservatory, many paleobotanists do use conservatories and greenhouses to grow plants at elevated carbon dioxide conditions and understand morphologies and structures of plant groups that may have changed through time.
“Paleobotany is the study of fossil plants,” Miller said. “Paleobotanists study a wide range of aspects from large scale ecological changes spanning millions of years to examining specific morphological structures.”
Modern conservatories help the process of determining what past climates might have looked like.
“A paleobotanist has the challenge of trying to understand past ecosystems without having the opportunity to observe how these systems behave,” Miller said. “As a result, paleobotanists rely on models and proxies to estimate climatic changes based off of our modern understanding of plants.”
The site Miller is studying at Snowmass gives a unique insight into an ancient ecosystem.
“The Snowmass site provides a rare opportunity for looking at a single ecosystem over the last 140,000 years. The site captures the last major interglacial period as well as the last major glaciation event,” he said.
Even though the conservatory is a working facility used mainly for research, it is open to the public and for school tours.
