Virtually in Search of Nature
How times change. It was just a few weeks ago that I was helping to plan an iNaturalist app training, a phone app that allows one to photograph and upload an image of an organism, be it a plant or animal, to a website and get confirmation of its identity. If identified by two or more experts, it’s be deemed a research quality citing.
A group organized by the Carroll County/Madison County subchapter of the Northwest Arkansas Master Naturalists was planning to go out and plot locations of Ozark leatherwood, the namesake of the various branches of our Leatherwood creeks and Lake Leatherwood City Park. It is blooming now. This citizen scientist tool allows all of us to learn about our natural environment no matter what our skills and training.
Ozark leatherwood (Dirca decipiens) is one of four species known in the small genus Dirca. Three species are isolated or endemic to very narrow geographic areas. For example, Dirca occidentalis, western leatherwood is only known from a few localities in Central Coast areas of California.
The closest relative of Ozark Leatherwood is Dirca mexicana, found in a single mountain locality in northeastern Tamaulipas, Mexico, in an isolated habitat that includes a number of plant species typical of the Ozarks, like a close relative of our Ozark or vernal witch hazel (Hamamelis vernalis).
Eastern leatherwood (Dirca palustris), on the other hand, occurs in a wide range of eastern North America from southern Ontario to Northern Florida, west to Oklahoma, and northward to North Dakota.
Ozark leatherwood, a species only recognized as new to science in 2009, occurs in an eastern Kansas county, a couple of counties in Missouri, and a handful of counties in Arkansas, including Benton and Carroll. The largest populations of this globally rare species grow at Lake Leatherwood City Park and the West Leatherwood Creek below the Lake Leatherwood dam headed to and along Elk Ranch, and isolated spots here and there at Holiday Island.
But now like this isolated plant, the humans who might look for it are themselves isolated through social distancing. We must learn to do things on our own, like learning how to use iNaturalist and other social media platforms, just to stay connected with one another. Our virtual social life has become a dystopian reality ruled by a totalitarian micro-organism. Write that plot line.