Blame it on the mulberry, birch, and oak trees if you’re in Manhattan, said Guy Robinson, Ph.D., where Fordham University maintains the only official pollen monitoring station in the city. Those three species dominated Robinson’s latest sample slides heading into what’s traditionally the peak pollen weeks of the season—the first two weeks of May.

Robinson maintains and collects pollen samples from the station, located at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on 60th Street east of Columbus Avenue, as well as another station at Fordham’s Louis Calder Center in Armonk, New York. Throughout the spring and summer, he feeds the data to the National Allergy Bureau of the American Academy for Allergy, Asthma & Immunology and posts a spreadsheet on @FordhamPollen on X as a public service.

Robinson has been at it for 25 years, while teaching biology and paleoecology in the Department of Natural Sciences, first as a senior lecturer at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, now as a visiting scholar. Once a week, on Tuesdays, he hops up on a wall outside the McMahon residence hall on 60th Street and unwraps a clear inch-wide strip of tape from a cylinder in the Burkard spore trap. The cylinder makes one complete turn in a week. The top of the machine spins like a weather vane, capturing the microscopic particles that cause the seasonal suffering of so many.

After coiling the tape into a metal canister, he carries it to a biology lab in Lowenstein. There Robinson snips the tape into segments—one for every 24-hour period. Then he begins the tedious process of counting pollen particles. 

On April 30, peering through a microscope while working a rudimentary clicker counter with his left hand and making notes with his right, Robinson said that by now, he recognizes most of the different tree pollens “just at a glance.” That’s how he gets the number we all know as the “pollen count”—the number of pollen particles per cubic meter of air. 

He added, “Humans are still better at counting pollen than any machine.” 

No More Sycamores

Robinson has a paper in review now for the Urban Design and Planning Journal suggesting that municipalities should take into consideration the effects of allergens when creating their tree-planting plans.

“They do not need to be planting sycamores in the city,” he said, noting that the species is highly allergenic. Fortunately, the sycamore pollen numbers are already subsiding for this season.

Trees like cherry, hawthorne, and pear, with noticeable flowers, he said, are not major contributors to allergies because they are insect pollinated (the pollen is not carried by the wind).

Those wreaking the most allergy havoc are oak, birch, alder, walnut, sycamore, and elm. Pine pollen is not a major allergen, although pines produce a lot of pollen, he said.

Every year is slightly different in terms of timing and quantity of pollen, said Robinson. But tree pollen nearly always peaks in the same order each year, with sycamore pollen appearing first. 

So what can you do if you are allergic to pollen?

“What we learned during COVID is that what does seem to have helped is wearing a mask,” Robinson said.  “Even the cheapest ones filter out most of the pollen.”

When she showed up for class one day at her school in Bellerose, Queens, without gym clothes, she had to sit it out in a room that happened to have a diagram of a heart on the wall.

“Another one of my friends didn’t have gym clothes, so she also had to sit out too, and I was looking at the diagram, and I was like, ‘I’m going to teach you the parts of the heart,’ she said.

“I said, ‘This is the right ventricle, this is the left atrium, this is where the SA node is. My teacher came over and said, ‘How do you know all of this?’”

A Focus on Public Health

For that, she credits her grandfather Osmond Quiah, M.D., a psychiatrist in Brooklyn who was a cardiologist in his native Bangladesh. Quiah schooled her in the intricacies of the heart, and today, Bhuiyan is on the pre-med track and pursuing a bachelor’s degree in anthropology at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. She plans to earns a master’s degree in public health and hopes to earn an MD so she can specialize in cross-cultural psychiatry; she wants to help cultural institutions better respond to mental health crises.

Bhuiyan’s minor in environmental science has allowed her to work on public-health-related research with Guy Robinson, Ph.D., lecturer in biology, on research related to public health. Before the pandemic, she was working on a method to detect microscopic bits of plastic and tire rubber amid the dust particles that get collected at the Lincoln Center aeroallergen station. When the lockdown last spring made that unfeasible, Robinson tasked her with analyzing 20 years of pollen records from the Calder Center to see if the lockdown had any effect on the weed pollen in the air last spring.

“Our reasoning is that mowing of highway verges, ball fields, and parks was much reduced, with a resulting increase in grass and weed pollen,” Robinson said, noting that the research also involves calling municipalities and landscaping companies to find out how much their work was delayed.

An Eye-Opening Trip to New Orleans

Bhuiyan said the fact that a major increase in pollen, which is an allergen, could precipitate a public health emergency, is what drew her to the project. In the spring of 2019, a trip to New Orleans with Global Outreach gave her a first-hand view of how the environment, health, and politics can collide in devastating fashion.

“We learned about how the introduction of the [man made]Mississippi River gulf outlet led to a devastation of cypress trees, which increased the surge during Hurricane Katrina, and how that devastated out the Lower 9th Ward, which predominantly consisted of people of color. I just saw how everything that was going on was so interdisciplinary,” she said.

Robinson said Bhuiyan’s experience as the sports and health editor at The Observer student newspaper has proved invaluable in their research.

“Aiza has been great to do research with; she takes initiative and thinks about her work expansively. Her journalism experience makes her really good at explaining things and knowing the right questions to ask,” he said.

Examining Colorism

As part of her anthropology work, Bhuiyan is also working on a senior thesis, “Navigating Colorism in Bengali Communities in NYC.” She said she was inspired by her own experience growing up in a community that is grappling with ideas of race and ethnicity.

“I am darker in complexion than a lot of people, especially my family. There were things that I had to hear, and that affected my mental health,” she said.

“It made me more cognizant of my own identity, and how I choose to present myself, and I thought it would be something really interesting to research further.”

Yuko Miki, Ph.D., an assistant professor of history who got to know Bhuiyan through her class Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World, called her a force of nature.

“She brought so much positive energy to our class while also dedicating herself to helping others,” she said, citing Bhuiyan’s role as co-coordinator of the Fordham College at Lincoln Center chapter of Peer Health Exchange, a group that offers health education to ninth graders in public schools.

“Students like Aiza have truly enriched my experience as a Fordham professor, and I think she will do great things in the world,” said Miki, who has focused much of her own scholarship on issues of race and ethnicity.

Finding Ways to Maintain Connection

Bhuiyan said the pandemic has made her senior year very difficult, and although she’s had more free time since she only commutes from home in New Hyde Park in Long Island once a week, she’s felt more disorganized and busier than in the past. The silver lining, she said, has come from the ways she was able to maintain relationships from afar. Starting in the fall, for instance, she and her Peer Health Exchange colleagues held weekly workshop group meetings where they were free to discuss any and everything on volunteer’s minds.

“It’s been amazing finding ways to retain my relationships with family, friends, and people I work with, and trying to find a way to keep some sense of normalcy going,” she said.

Listen here:

Patrick Verel: This is Patrick Verel, and today I’m speaking with Guy Robinson, a senior lecture in the department of Nashville Sciences at Fordham. What is typically the worst time of year for pollen and how does this year compare to that?

Guy Robinson: This is typically the worst time of year. So late April to early May is usually when the middle of the season is getting underway and what you’ll start to get is a co-occurrence of Birch, and then with Oak, and these are usually the largest numbers that we get of pollen throughout the year, in face.

Patrick Verel: Now there’s typically a certain sequence that the plants follow, right?

Guy Robinson: Yes, absolutely. There is a set sequence, so in that respect the pollen every year is very predictable. So we’ll start out, sometime as early as February we’ll start to see Cyprus pollen that may be mixed in with Elm and Alder and sometimes a bit of Maple. The Maple will then continue to increase and the Cyprus will probably hit it’s peak sometimes in March. Then you start to see other species begin to join in as the Cyprus’s are declining.

Patrick Verel: Talk to me about catkins, which sounds like a delightful cartoon character.

Guy Robinson: Catkins are actual the technical term we use for these structures, the structures that carry many flowers on the trees as they’re releasing the pollen into the air. But what I noticed last week, I noticed in Manhattan here that there were just huge amounts of catkins that had already fallen from the Oak trees. Now this tells me that probably we’re passed the peak for Oak and this tells me also that we’re probably past the peak for pollen in the Manhattan area. There may still be a peak to come in the northern suburbs but I think we’re passed some of the worst of it already, because so many of them are already on the ground, which tells us that the trees have already released the pollen and have dropped the structures that do the job of releasing them.

Patrick Verel: So it’s fair to say to say that if you’re somebody who’s allergic to this type of pollen, that if you’re walking around in the park and you see these on the ground, that might bring you a little bit of sense of relief. Okay, the peak has passed, I might be feeling better in the next few weeks.

Guy Robinson: Yeah that’s true. Certainly if you’re allergic to Oak. If you’re allergic to Hickory, well your trouble is about to begin.

Patrick Verel: Now you monitor a couple of different stations around the New York city area. Can you talk to me a little bit about the differences that you see between the two of them?

Guy Robinson: So we have a station in here in midtown Manhattan on 60th street ,and we have another one up in Armonk, up in the northern suburbs. Now typically, we’re going to see the same sequence of pollen occurring as the season kind of unfolds. So the same sequence of different species will come one after another in a very predictable pattern. The main difference I would say is that typically the 60th street midtown station will start seeing things a day or two early. It doesn’t always happen that way, but usually they’ll be just a little bit earlier.

Patrick Verel: Is there any one kind of pollen that is the one that really drives people nuts when you think about allergies, because this is often what gets people talking about it is when there’s high counts of this stuff.

Guy Robinson: Yeah the ones that are often the real trouble makers … There’s several actually, but the big ones probably are birch and oak and I would say there is also ash, which you don’t usually think about a great deal. There’s also London plain, which is common in the city because so many street trees are London plains. They’re otherwise known as Sycamore, but we also get a lot of Pine pollen, but those don’t tend to me troublesome in terms of allergies.

Patrick Verel: So going forward, what kinds of pollen will we be seeing?

Guy Robinson: We’ll be getting a little bit of grass. We’ve seen a little bit this month already, which is not unusual, but it’ll start to increase towards the end of the month. The grasses, and then will continue into June. There’ll be a second season for grasses that occurs after the summer, so there’s usually a gap in the summer where we don’t get any pollen at all, then we come to a second grass season, which usually starts in around September or October, and then we get the largest amount of grasses. But for the rest of this month, we’ll start to see those grasses coming in for that first season, and then we’ll start to see hickory and walnut and a couple of other late season trees.

Patrick Verel: Is there anything about the northeast that’s unique when it comes to pollen?

Guy Robinson: I wouldn’t say unique exactly, but when you get into what we call the mid latitudes, you tend to get a lot of wind pollinated species. As you go further south, into the subtropics and then the tropics particularly, many more species are pollinated by insects, and those tend to be much less troublesome. Most people who have allergies badly up here in the northeast, if they were to go to the Caribbean for a vacation, they would probably find they don’t get allergies there.

If you want to know what kind of pollen is drifting around outside, it’s not that hard to fashion a collection device out of a Frisbee, a jar, and some glycerol.

But to help Kate Weinberger track the pollen levels of 45 locations around New York City, Guy Robinson, Ph.D., needed to come up with something different.

Robinson, a lecturer of biology at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, has monitored pollen levels at the Lincoln Center campussince 2009, when Fordham’s pollen monitoring was expanded from a single station at the Louis Calder Biological Field Station. In April, he started tweeting his weekly counts at @FordhamPollen.

Weinberger, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University’s School of Public Health, sought out Robinson to help her develop a project to systematically measure how pollen is dispersed around the five boroughs.

Unlike the monitors that Robinson deploys on the roof of Fordham Law School and the Calder Center, these had to be compact enough to piggyback on the 150 light poles where the Department of Health maintains air pollution monitoring equipment. The design mimics the way that pollen gets trapped in lake floors and bogs.

“We needed a design that’s not nearly so bulky. It had to be compact and be able to be strapped to a pole. So we just took a screw end cap, and a slip cap for schedule 40 PVC piping, which you can get a hardware store, and is quite thick and sturdy,” Robinson said.

His final version looks a little like a squat cocktail shaker with a hat. The screw that attaches the bottom to the carrier also connects to a mounting brace, allowing for easy removal. Weinberger installed the first ones in late February and early March; they will be taken down for analysis in December.

The installation followed a successful pilot project that Weinberger ran from August through December at ten locations. What made the pilot intriguing for Robinson was the fact that at some locations, even when ragweed was observed nearby, very little of the plants’ pollen accumulated in the trap. Robinson attributed this to the vagaries of air currents, which are influenced by structures big and small.

“It’s not always as easy to predict, but the detectors can pick up what people are actually exposed to,” he said.

“Even if theoretically, we should say ‘This is going to be a high exposure site,’ it doesn’t necessarily turn out that way.”

Pollen counts have not been undertaken on a scale of this size since 1935, when the Works Progress Administraion (W.P.A.) organized a city-wide survey of air pollution. And while modern day New Yorkers do not have to worry about the amount of coal dust they inhale the way previous generations did, they are afflicted by asthma and allergies, often in geographically distinct ways.

Asthma has been found to be more prevalent in poorer communities, although Robinson said he’s not convinced that pollen plays a significant role in that difference.

“We had a monitor at the South Bronx, and we ran it concurrently with several others, including one right here at Lincoln Center, but we found little difference in the pollen influx among these sites. There was a bit of a change in the composition, mainly different tree types, but that’s it,” he said.

“Our main contact at the Department of Health said the one parameter that pediatric asthma correlates with is poverty, and all the things that go along with it, like poor medical care and only getting treatment when it’s already an emergency.”

A project like Weinberger’s is still valuable though, to people who suffer from seasonal allergies.

“Are people out in Brooklyn, like those near the coast, really getting exposed to what we’re reporting to the clinics, the media and everybody else? Is this really what they’re getting exposed to? In one sense, yes, the flowering times of all these plants don’t change that much,” Robinson said.

“But from day to day and from neighborhood to neighborhood, there could be a lot of variability. That’s what we’re trying to get a handle on now.”

Prehistoric Objects Right at Home at Lincoln Center

Photos by Bruce Gilbert

Guy Robinson, Ph.D., lecturer in biology, digs old stuff. Really old stuff. In fact, the fossils he keeps at Lincoln Center date back as far as 400 million years. Along with an assortment of visual aids, such as a modern giraffe skull from the Bronx Zoo, they help him bring the lessons of flora and fauna directly into the hands of students.

  ]]> 31242 https://now.fordham.edu/science/fordhamscience-exit-mastodon/ Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:09:45 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=42661 Sometimes the smallest of clues can pierce the largest of mysteries. One of the big (in every sense of the word) questions in paleontology is “where did the North American megafauna—mastodons, mammoths, giant sloths, giant beavers!—go?” The answer might come from a fossil spore too small to be seen with the naked eye.

The key to discovering why the giant herbivores died out may be when their numbers began to dwindle: about 14,800 years ago, according to a team of researchers that includes Fordham’s Guy Robinson. Their 2009 paper, “Pleistocene megafaunal collapse preceded novel plant communities and enhanced fire regimes,” is based upon the concentrations of fossil spores found in lake sediments in the Midwest and northeast.

Robinson, a lecturer in the Department of Natural Sciences at Lincoln Center, tracks Sporormiella, a fungus that produces spores which must pass through the gut of a large herbivore to germinate. The spores are between 9 and 12 microns in diameter (about one-fifth the diameter of a human hair), and are found in the dung of large herbivorous vertebrates like mastodons and giant beavers (did we mention the giant beavers?). Over time the dung would be washed by rain into lakes, where the spores, along with pollen and charcoal, collected in layers of sediment.

Lots of spores means lots of dung; lots of dung means lots of animals. Tracking the amount of spores, pollen and charcoal at different sediment depths allows the changes in numbers of large herbivores to be matched exactly to sediment records of vegetation and fire, which can in turn be compared with other archaeological and environmental records.

Beginning 14,800 years ago, the plant communities of North America started to change dramatically, going by pollen counts from the lake sediments. Robinson, who also oversees the Pollen Index at Fordham, saw a rise in novel or “no-analog” plant communities which had high percentages of temperate broadleaved trees such as ash, hornbeam, ironwood and elm coexisting with northern species such as spruce and larch—trees not found growing together previously, or today.

As the incidence of Sporormiella (and hence large herbivores) declined over a 1,000-year period, the incidence of pollen grains from novel plant communities increased, as did the incidence of charcoal, indicating fires.

What do all of these clues point to? Butchered mammoth bones found in southeastern Wisconsin can be dated to between 14,800 and 14,100 years ago, indicating the presence of humans in the region at the beginning of the decline of large herbivores. One pretty good hypothesis is that over the period between 14,800 and 13,300 years ago, human hunters reduced the population of mammoths, mastodons and other large herbivores. As the herbivores declined, the trees on which they fed, broadleafs like elm and oak, increased, as did the amount of standing and dead wood and leaf litter available to fuel wildfires (and possibly fires set by humans for hunting and land-clearing purposes).

The archeological and fossil records seem to indicate that the population of large herbivores goes extinct altogether between 13,300 and 12,900, which corresponds exactly with the arrival of the Clovis people, big-game specialists named for their stone points first excavated in Clovis, N.M.

Robinson stresses that this interpretation of the record is somewhat controversial: other contenders for the decline and eventual extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna include climate change, an extraterrestrial impact, and disease or some combination of the three, as well as human predation.

But the decline of the large herbivores (as measured by Sporormiella concentrations) precedes the increase of no-analog plant communities. If climate change reduced the number of herbivores, it didn’t do so by changing the habitat. Likewise, the hypothesis that a meteor or comet slammed into North America approximately 13,000 years ago and killed the megafauna isn’t consistent with a gradual decline of the large herbivores, nor the timing of its beginning.

This summer, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) will present the William Skinner Cooper Award to Robinson, along with colleagues Jacquelyn Gill, John Williams, Stephen T. Jackson and Katherine Lininger for their paper, which ESA says “contributes to the fundamental understanding of ecological history in eastern North America.” The award will be given at ESA’s annual meeting in August, in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Meanwhile, Robinson and his colleagues are extending their research by sampling lake sediments in more locations. “The samples our paper was based upon were all from lowland sites,” Robinson says. “We’re now moving into higher elevations in the Shawangunk Mountains, and we’re starting to see indications that the decline in Sporormiella is what you’d expect if it was being caused by human predation: there is a lag in the decline in higher elevations because humans move into the richer lowlands first.”

More evidence to support the hunting hypothesis is also coming to light in sediments from the late Holocene, 200 to 300 years ago, Robinson says. The samples seem to indicate a rebound of large herbivores on a significant scale following Europeans’ first contact with Native Americans. Researchers hypothesize that first-contact epidemics essentially depopulated the continent, drastically reducing hunting pressure on wildlife.

Robinson believes that the data strongly supports human hunting as a prime cause of large herbivore declines and extinctions, but that it may take a while for scientific opinion to come around.

“Like the fact that Africa and the Americas were once joined, many things that seem self evident now were highly controversial when they were first proposed,” he says. “That pre-historical, pre-agricultural people could have such a profound effect on their environment may be hard for people to accept for reasons that have nothing to do with the data.”