By Sheldon Greaves

Note: This item originally appeared in 2013, but I’m running it here as part of Citizen Science Month 2022.

Source: The Boston Globe

Bryan Hamlin did not expect to find much of interest when he and his wife, Anne, embarked one Sunday in April 2003 on a walk through the Middlesex Fells Reservation, the large nature preserve near their new house.

Hamlin — a plant lover who had “botanized” in far more glamorous landscapes — entered the Fells with modest expectations. But as they hiked deeper in, he was impressed by the richness of the flora, and started noting what he saw.

“This place isn’t so bad,” he recalls thinking.

So when he came across a Boston University study reporting 155 plant species had disappeared from a section of the Fells over the last century, he vowed to give the matter a second look, a “proper follow-up.”

Now, after a nine-year quest, Hamlin and collaborators have documented finding 105 of the purportedly lost species. And he says he’s learned that citizen scientists can make important contributions to science, though he fears they’re often not heard.

The authors of the original 1996 paper, Richard Primack of Boston University and his graduate student at the time, Brian Drayton, say Hamlin’s work doesn’t undermine their basic conclusion — that the number of native species is declining as nonnative plants increase — but credit the citizen-organized effort with providing a more complete data set. 

Hamlin’s team surveyed the entire reservation and spent far longer looking — 2,000 hours, versus less than 400 by the BU team — which accounts for part of the difference in their findings.

Hamlin, 72, a skilled amateur botanist who did his first plant survey as a boarding school student in England, typically dons a fisherman’s vest when he goes out into the field. He fills the pockets with a magnifying lens, a notebook, and two pens — in case one fails — and an old knife that his wife won’t miss to take samples.

Even in winter, he will halt over a pile of dried leaves, his blue eyes widening behind round wire-rimmed glasses, as he recalls the drama of spotting something quite wonderful there in another season: a very rare buttercup.

Back when he began his study of the Fells, Hamlin was winding down his peace work for a non-governmental organization, which involved traveling to conflict-prone areas of the world to help facilitate dialogue between opposing groups. Even during those trips, greenery was never far out of Hamlin’s mind. In Israel, he once pulled over to jump a fence and take a photo of a giant hollyhock while his traveling companion, an imam, looked on in confusion.

A microbiologist by training, Hamlin kept a spreadsheet and recorded where he found plants in the Fells and whether they were blooming. He brought his tripod and camera into the woods at times and used the cluttered solarium of his Medford house to do plant pressings, stacking encyclopedias atop samples to dry them out.

Read more about this amateur botanist.