Assistant Professor Ioana Popescu’s classes are spending the semester locating, identifiying, and mapping every tree on Drury’s campus.

By Brandy Gordon

In the not-too-distant future, visitors and students will have an additional resource for navigating and appreciating Drury's botanical campus: a map identifying Drury's estimated 1,000 trees.

The tree-mapping project is being conducted by Assistant Professor of Biology Dr. Ioana Popescu. The goal is to gather as much information as possible on the trees of Drury's campus to compile an interactive virtual map, in which trees will appear as dots on an overview of Drury's campus.

“A web visitor could click on a ‘dot' tree and a picture of that tree will show smaller links to pictures of the same tree in bloom, fall and foliage,” Popescu explained, “Each tree will also have a species description, as well as all the possible details about that particular tree itself.”

Such information may include when it was planted, for whom it was planted as an honorary marker, possible size estimations, including diameter at breast height (DBH) or even total height. Popescu estimates that she will find more than 40 species of trees on the campus, including Bradford pears, redbuds, hickory, walnuts, honey locust and basswood.

Biology research students and non-biology major Science and Inquiry students are assisting Popescu in information collection. Each of the students, who were divided into teams, received a small tree-finder book. Teams are assigned to cover a specific piece of the campus, where they seek to identify the trees with the aid of more detailed books and information from Popescu.

She says she hopes the virtual map eventually will be connected to Drury's website. Maps will also be available in hard copy for educational campus tours by students and teachers of the Springfield public schools.

It was this use, in part, that led Popescu to begin the project shortly after coming to Drury University . “An area high school teacher came to our department to inquire about such a map in order to bring his students the next day on a botanical Drury campus tour,” Popescu explained.

As a teaching assistant in Cincinnati , she would take her Field and Systematic Botany class on field trips to an arboretum. Popescu says the useful maps for tree identification at the arboretum also sparked her interest in her current project.

Preliminary data was then collected in research classes in the fall of 2001, fall of 2002 and spring of 2002. However, limitations in equipment and funding led Popescu to abandon the project for a time.

It wasn't until the spring of 2006 that Popescu's project was revisited with the help of Paula McBurnett, director of Development for Institutional Advancement, who also happens to be a master gardener. McBurnett was able to connect Popescu with Major Close, an area benefactor currently developing a botanical garden in Nathaniel Green Park . Close provided funding for the project. Darla Harmon, director of corporate and foundation relations, assisted in writing and submitting a grant proposal for the project.