The work of the late Kiwi mycologist, Doctor Greta Stevenson, has been recognised by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, where hundreds of her fungal specimens are stored.
Christopher Kreuzer, an Honorary Research Associate at Kew, told 1News that Stevenson was a trailblazer for women in science and for science in general.
“It was quite a large collection, and she brought it all the way by boat to here, which was an incredible story.
“Kew was the world’s centre of research at that time so she would have known that bringing it here, it would be a good place to work on the collection.”
Stevenson was born in Auckland in 1911 and moved to Dunedin as a young child.
She studied botany at the University of Otago and completed her PhD at Imperial College in London before returning to New Zealand. Her life saw frequent moves around New Zealand and to the UK.
She started working at Kew in 1959, before returning to New Zealand in 1970, where she worked as a researcher and teacher. She died in London in 1990.
Stevenson identified more than 100 new mushroom species in a five-part series on New Zealand’s gilled mushrooms published in Kew’s scientific journal.
Her collection spans 3000 specimens, kept in the UK and New Zealand. Specimens from collectors that contributed to Stevenson’s work are also valuable for researchers.
“When you look into the data… you see some of the same names coming up… so you can draw a line there with a laboratory technician from Nelson collected a specimen in the 1950s, and it's now being analysed here for its genetic data, and that's feeding into research now and in the future,” Kreuzer told 1News.
Kew is sequencing the DNA from their fungal specimens in the search for chemicals that could be used in medicine, among other uses.
Greta Stevenson’s work is one of the stories Kew is shining a light on after digitising 7.3 million plant and fungal specimens at a cost of more than $65 million, making them available to the world.
Kew’s mission is to protect plants and fungi as the world heats up from climate change.
It’s hoped that the online specimen collection will make it easier for researchers to understand how species coped with different climates in the past as they search for solutions.
“It's a massive breakthrough, just being able to search collections anywhere in the world, and it makes it so much easier,” Kreuzer said.
Without the project, researchers like Kreuzer would still have to manually access Kew’s collection of dried fungal species in their fungarium to find information. The collection is the largest in the world, with over 1.25 million fungal specimens.
Kreuzer explained how Stevenson worked at a time when men’s attitudes towards women meant that contributions to science by women often lacked recognition, and some found it hard to advance in their careers as a result.
His research examines who collected specimens for Stevenson and how the scientist was focused on recognising the many collectors supporting her work.
“The new species that she discovered, she named many of them after the women who had collected them,” he said.
“Later in life, she left a legacy to Imperial College, where she did her PhD, which was explicitly to fund scientific work by women.”
The rest of Stevenson’s collection are safely stored in the New Zealand Fungarium – Te Kohinga Hekaheka o Aotearoa.
“You can see that the number of collections of mushrooms in New Zealand really spiked during her period of being an active mycologist,” Bioeconomy Science Institute Maiangi Taiao mycologist Dr Bevan Weir said.
Her notes and illustrations on fungal discoveries are also part of the collection.
Specimens at the facility have been digitised for decades and were accessed by Kreuzer as part of his Kew research. Now researchers there, including Weir, are welcoming Kew’s digitisation project so they can access Greta Stevenson’s UK-based specimens online too, with information less likely to be missed.
“Having these specimens digitised is kind of like having a time machine, going back in time and seeing what the mushrooms and all these plants were like at that point in time,” Weir said.
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