Andrew Thornhill moved to Armidale at the start of 2023 to become the director of N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium and lecturer in plant systematics. Pulse caught up with him to learn more about him, his passion for botany and his vision for the Herbarium.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up at UNE in the role?
I grew up in Melbourne, and I have wanted to be a botanist since starting my undergraduate at Monash University in 1996. The year before, when I was 18, I had my whole knee replaced with a metal prosthetic joint in a world first operation and had 13 rounds of high dose chemotherapy to save me from bone cancer (osteosarcoma). I had thought I might be a zoologist, but when the orthopaedic surgeon cut my knee out it meant I couldn’t run. I decided that it would be easier to catch plants instead. I started growing carnivorous plants and that led to a Masters project at Monash University studying pitcher plants. While doing my Masters I participated in an eight-week intern program at the Australian National Herbarium in Canberra and decided that systematics is what I wanted to do. I moved to Canberra and did my PhD at ANU. After that I moved around a lot for work. I lived and worked in Cairns, Berkeley (California), Adelaide, and then I moved here at the start of 2023 to become the director of N.C.W. Beadle Herbarium and lecturer in plant systematics. This is a rare role to be advertised; Jeremy Bruhl has been in this position for the past 30 years, and there have only been four herbarium directors at UNE, so I’m lucky to have it. There are also not many places left in Australia that teaches botany the way UNE does, which makes my job even rarer because I am in charge of an herbarium and also teach, and also research.
What skills and experience do you bring to the role?
I have worked in various herbaria over my career including the Australian National Herbarium at CSIRO in Canberra, the Australian Tropical Herbarium at James Cook University in Cairns, the University and Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley, and the State Herbarium of South Australia in Adelaide. At the same time, I have worked at a lot of universities including ANU, James Cook University, UC Berkeley, University of Adelaide and now UNE. I have friends and colleagues all around the world and have written papers with at least one person from every continent (except Antarctica). That’s the nice thing about doing science, you make friends and colleagues everywhere.
I have worked on lots of different subjects including palynology, phylogenetics, systematics, biogeography, and animal-plant co-evolution. When I was at Berkeley I co-named a field of science called ‘spatial phylogenetics’ – a “big data” field that combines large-scale molecular phylogenetics, geospatial information obtained from collection data, and randomisation tests to identify unique areas of diversity and endemism to enable evolutionary, ecological, and biogeographic interpretations of these patterns. No one had used the term until we came up with and now people all around the world do spatial phylogenetic studies.
In Australia I have made large species level phylogenies of the eucalypts and Australian Acacia, and overseas I have made phylogenetic analyses of the flora of California and Chile. I also like fossil pollen and I used these as calibrations in molecular dating analyses of Myrtaceae. Most recently I have started trying to specialise in bryophytes (mosses, liverworts, and hornworts) because Australia, and also the world, have a lack of expertise for this group.
Not many universities have herbariums nowadays. In what direction would you like to take the UNE Herbarium?
Many universities have stopped offering taxonomic and systematic subjects such as pure botany, zoology and entomology. These subjects though underpin much of the conservation, ecological and biological computational work that other biologists do. How does an ecologist make a species count without taxonomists describing and identifying the organism that they are counting? They can’t. Supporting taxonomic work are institutes such as herbaria and museums that store the type specimens of every described species, as well as identified specimens representing each species’ distributional range, which gives basis as to where each species occurs in the world. The Beadle Herbarium has over 110,000 plant collections and we contribute our information to the Australasian Virtual Herbarium which collates the records of Australasian herbaria and makes it freely available online. It is also then contributed to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) that does the same thing at a world scale. This is only one thing that the Beadle Herbarium does and will continue to do while I am overseeing it.
UNE Botany has a rich history of describing new species and producing floras and keys. In fact UNE Botany punches way above its weight in Australian botany. Some of the positions that our alumni have gone onto include Herbarium Director of the Queensland Herbarium, Professor of Botany at JCU, Head herbarium curator at the New South Wales Herbarium, and the Chief Editor of the four volumes of New South Wales. UNE staff and alumni have produced numerous plant identification books and still continue to do so including the most recent the Orchids of New South Wales by Lachlan Copeland. This is something that I hope to continue doing but in a modern way. UNE Botany has been a hub for making identification keys and I would like to see us move to producing online interactive keys that anyone can access. We can even build upon the work done by our previous botanists and turn their published printed work into interactive accessible digital keys.
Given that UNE is one of the last places to offer botany as a subject, I feel that the responsibility of training the next generation of botanists lies with us. We have our own herbarium, our collections are all recorded in database built for purpose by the UNE CASI group led by Johan Boshoff. We are situated close to many national parks and areas that are diversity hotspots of Australian plants. Students doing Botany at UNE can get an all-round research and training experience that will give them a massive advantage over students from other universities. My hope is that by the time I pass the directorship on to the next person that we have alumni employed all around Australia, and that they earned those roles through the training and learning that they did with us at the herbarium.
Do you have any hobbies or interests you would like to share with Pulse?
My only religion is the Collingwood Football Club of which I have been a member since birth. If Collingwood is playing then you’ll find me in front of my TV at home, or preferably but rarely, at the game. In the mid-90s (after my knee replacement) I worked for the Collingwood as a statistician. Also because of the knee replacement I took up lawn-bowls when I was 18 and ended up becoming a coach. I stopped playing when I was 32 but have come out of retirement every now and then. I could be coaxed out of retirement again here but haven’t had an offer yet. Most of my weekend is spent gardening. I have a dislike of non-native Australian plants and I have bought a house on a double-block in Armidale that is full of noxious woody weeds that I spend all weekends removing. I am doing it properly and so not only do I cut the tree down, I then dig out the stump using a mattock. Once I beat the weeds I will be turning my place into a native botanic garden, attempting to make it look more like it was before Europeans came along by planting as many endemic native plants as I can. It is going to take a while though. I also enjoy going for a bushwalk, especially in spring. I used to hold an orchid hunt around Black Mountain in Canberra every year. I really need to get out a bit more in the tablelands and start looking for mosses and liverworts, and flowering plants too.
Anything else you would like to add?
When I finally get settled here I would like to recreate a couple of things I did just before moving away from Adelaide. I was asked to make or host an art exhibition on moss. It was to be housed in Gallery Flaneur which is the smallest art gallery in Adelaide. I can’t draw very well, but my partner can. Anne-Marie wished to remain anonymous (whoops!) but agreed to do the exhibition with me. I provided the images and Anne-Marie painted and sculpted the art. We set up an Instagram page and called the project An.Annie.Moss (https://www.instagram.com/an.annie.moss.art/). I found an old dolls house and we converted it into a miniature art gallery to hold all art, our Mosseum. The exhibition was on display in the middle of Adelaide CBD for three weeks and then moved to the Adelaide Botanic gardens for all of summer. All of the artwork is now with us in Armidale and I would like to make a new exhibit for here some time.
At the same time as the art exhibition I also created the world’s first every moss-based trivia night called Mosstermind (https://www.abc.net.au/adelaide/mosstermind/101511500). In collaboration with Jules Schiller the host of ABC Adelaide Radio Drive program we got over 150 paid participants to come along, It would be kind of cool to hold Mosstermind again in Armidale, I think I know where it can be held now. At the same time as the art exhibition and the Mosstermind event I also filmed a segment with Gardening Australia which was shown early this year. In fact I’ve been on it twice and it’s been really good fun.
https://www.abc.net.au/gardening/how-to/my-garden-path-dr-andrew-thornhill/102253198
https://www.abc.net.au/gardening/how-to/pollen-oscopy/13831834
Hopefully I can keep doing events like that now that I’m in Armidale. If anyone has ideas then I’m all ears.