The Mineral Delivery Route

ABSTRACT Aaron Treher, The Mineral Delivery Route M.F.A., Department of Art and Art History Thesis directed by Professor Richard Saxton Mineral Delivery Route, is a multidisciplinary visual arts project that examines boundaries of culture, community, and nature through false-front structures, barns, and suburban houses. This thesis is a derivation of three years of research, investigating the formal and conceptual overlap of people and animals. Through my artistic practice I examine the perspective of barn swallows through the spaces they utilize for nest building. Unlike other animals which find their habitats in trees, shrubs, grass, or rocks, barn swallows use man-made architecture exclusively; defying the binary of man-made and natural habitats. Their perspective places no hierarchical boundaries between people or animals, urban or rural, culture and ecology , or pest and native species. For barn swallows, the world is a continuum of materials, forms, and spatial relationships. Human architecture offers shelter, stability, and little competition from other wild animals. My methodological approach involves a formal and conceptual investigation of avian habitats as they relate to barn swallows specifically, and their relationship to the human built environment. As mentioned previously, barn swallows build nests on barns but nest in a vast variety of structures, both agricultural and beyond. Their nesting habits make them a unique subject to draw from for an arts practice. Drawing, documentation, material studies, and construction of sculptures all play a part in examining the overlap of habitats and cultural spaces. Additionally, this thesis maps artists, ecologists and art theorists that help in building an understanding of the built environment, architecture, ecology, and culture as elements of the continuum and habitats of barn swallows

Rhynchospora mesoatlantica (Cyperaceae), an imperiled new species of beaksedge from eastern U.S.A.

Rhynchospora mesoatlantica sp. nov. (Cyperaceae) is described, illustrated, and compared with morphologically similar species. Rhynchospora mesoatlantica is known only from southern Delaware, southeastern Maryland, and southern New Jersey, all within the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S.A. It inhabits sunny, wet margins of natural, shallow, nutrient-poor, seasonal ponds of the Coastal Plain. Narrow leaf blades; fruits obpyriform in outline; faces of mature fruits possessing a central, pale, well-demarcated disk; and fruit tubercle margins denticulate for most of their lengths indicate R. mesoatlantica is most similar to R. filifolia and R. harperi. Rhynchospora mesoatlantica is unique in its fruit dimensions, scales intermediate in length between R. filifolia and R. harperi, and relatively long fruit stipe. The NatureServe rank of Critically Imperiled and the IUCN rank of Endangered appear warranted for R. mesoatlantica because only six populations are known to be extant, most quite small and isolated; all populations occur within a small geographic area; populations have declined; and serious threats confront the survival of the species

Rhynchospora mesoatlantica (Cyperaceae), an imperiled new species of beaksedge from eastern U.S.A.

Rhynchospora mesoatlantica sp. nov. (Cyperaceae) is described, illustrated, and compared with morphologically similar species. Rhynchospora mesoatlantica is known only from southern Delaware, southeastern Maryland, and southern New Jersey, all within the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S.A. It inhabits sunny, wet margins of natural, shallow, nutrient-poor, seasonal ponds of the Coastal Plain. Narrow leaf blades; fruits obpyriform in outline; faces of mature fruits possessing a central, pale, well-demarcated disk; and fruit tubercle margins denticulate for most of their lengths indicate R. mesoatlantica is most similar to R. filifolia and R. harperi. Rhynchospora mesoatlantica is unique in its fruit dimensions, scales intermediate in length between R. filifolia and R. harperi, and relatively long fruit stipe. The NatureServe rank of Critically Imperiled and the IUCN rank of Endangered appear warranted for R. mesoatlantica because only six populations are known to be extant, most quite small and isolated; all populations occur within a small geographic area; populations have declined; and serious threats confront the survival of the species