Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

Professor Edd Barrows and biology senior-thesis student Claire McNulty discuss damselflies and dragonflies related to her research.
Professor Edd Barrows looks for soil arthropods at the base of a venerable American Beech.
A brilliant male Karner Blue Butterfly imbibes nectar from a flower of Silvery Cinquefoil in a Wisconsin prairie.

"I have a life-long interest in biodiversity, in everything around us related to life."

Tracking arthropod and plant populations in nature preserves and on Georgetown University campuses, Professor Edward M. Barrows is intimately familiar with the landscape of GU.

While sitting on a bench in Heyden Memorial Garden (quite possibly the most beautiful location on Georgetown’s Main Campus), Dr. Barrows looks around the garden and explains, “I have a life-long interest in biodiversity, in everything around us related to life.” He then points out an early butterfly, a Dancing White, and explains that the large wooded area just next to the garden is actually Glover Archbold Park, a part of the National Park System.

In the Heyden Garden alone, Professor Barrows speculates that there are more than 100 species of plants and more than 1,000 species of arthropods. This includes insects, spiders, and crustaceans. Throughout the world, arthropods perform many invaluable ecosystem services including aerating soil, aiding in organic decomposition and nutrient recycling, filling crucial roles in food webs, and pollinating crops and other plants. The majority of crop plant species depend on insects for pollination. Many people would soon face major food shortages and possibly starvation if this important ecosystem service ceased.

Unfortunately, with the current climate changes occurring on our planet, many arthropods are in great jeopardy. “Earth is undergoing a major anthropogenic biodiversity crisis,” explains Professor Barrows. “We are inadvertently causing beneficial species to go extinct daily and killing untold numbers of them by destroying their habitats.”

In view of the major importance of arthropods, Professor Barrows’s lab, the Laboratory of Entomology and Biodiversity, is currently performing research on arthropods in local national parks, as well as in Wisconsin. The local national parks are the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, George Washington Memorial Parkway, and Glover Archbold Park. Each of these parks currently faces many harsh assaults including air, soil, and water pollution, overuse by people, and devastation by hundreds of species of alien, invasive organisms.

To help rescue and preserve the habitats and species in danger, Professor Barrows and his students go where they are needed, receiving grants from a variety of sources to collect and analyze information. On the Virginia side of the George Washington Memorial Parkway, his lab, including biology graduate student Aaron Howard, is working with the National Park Service to learn why three plant species are so rare. This research focuses on the importance of pollination in these plants’ conservation. Biology senior-thesis student Claire McNulty is also analyzing the community of damselflies and dragonflies (common predators and mosquito controllers) in a specific part of the Parkway, the Dyke Marsh Wildlife Preserve. Another graduate student, Deblyn Mead, is performing research on the biodiversity of long-horned beetles of the Preserve. During their research, the lab found several species previously unknown to science and several species previously unknown to be in Virginia.

With the view of managing the biota of the parks—a mission mandated by federal law—Professor Barrows’s lab is helping the National Park Service to learn what arthropods live in its parks, their abundances, and which habitats they occupy. Some of the lab’s work is explained in the 2006 environmental film On the Edge: The Potomac River’s Dyke Marsh, which premiered to a standing-room-only crowd at the Kennedy Center in 2006.

In Wisconsin, Barrows’s lab is working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Air National Guard to learn how to use adaptive management for the federally endangered Karner Blue Butterfly. Adaptive management is a process that involves learning about the biology of a species and how it reacts to existing management practices. By gathering and analyzing information, practices can be modified and improved. A small butterfly with beautifully patterned blue wings, the Karner Blue has a rich biological and cultural history. It was named Lycaeides melissa samuelis by the renowned Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, a passionate amateur lepidopterist.

"Did you know that?” Professor Barrows asks.

Did you?

While teaching forest ecology to GU undergraduates, Professor Barrows became increasingly interested in the natural history of Georgetown’s Main and Medical Campuses as he and students studied GU organisms. Over time, Humans have transformed the area from forest to pasture land and then into a vibrant university, making the land into an artificial savanna with many new tree species, buttes, cliffs, and other features. He describes this transformation process in his recent popular-style book, Nature, Gardens, and Georgetown. Filled with original and historic photos of the Georgetown area, Professor Barrows’s book shows the University in its early years surrounded by farmland, describes the historic College Walks (now long gone), and identifies many of the insects, plants, and other organisms that can be found locally.

His lab also provides educational information online with the Biodiversity Database of the Washington, D.C., Area. Primarily a creation of Professor Dan Kjar (a former GU graduate student) and Professor Barrows, the website includes information on many local organisms, as well as reports by GU undergraduates and photos of the biology seniors at their annual Senior Thesis Symposium. Another website focusing on arthropods in the D.C. area was primarily the work of four undergraduates jointly interning at the National Park Service and GU. At the current time Professor Barrows’s lab also includes two joint Washington Biologists’ Field Club and GU interns who are working on four taxonomic families of flies of Dyke Marsh Wildlife Preserve.

Another significant focus of Professor Barrows’s work is scientific communication. Written for both the scientific and non-scientific communities, his book Animal Behavior Desk Reference: A Dictionary of Animal Behavior, Ecology and Evolution concerns terminology and concepts of biology with a focus on organismal biology. As in other scientific areas, this terminology is vast and often puzzling, even to biologists in the field. Professor Barrows is currently working on a third edition of this best-selling scientific text.

In addition to his teaching, research, and writing, Barrows serves as the Director of the Georgetown Center for the Environment, Chair of the Committee on Science Buildings, and a member of the Graduate School Executive Committee. He also supervises the student-produced GU Journal on the Environment, works to promote environmental awareness at GU, advises Environmental Studies minors, and assists undergraduate and graduate students with their thesis and nonthesis research. His recent courses include Forest Ecology and Foundations in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior.

To learn more about work on insects and ecology at the Georgetown community, please see our recent article on Dr. Martha Weiss and her lab.

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