Claudia Knab-Vispo
A botanist shares her love for native meadows and plant/animal connections
Claudia Knab-Vispo, Ph.D.
Botanist, Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program
Growing up in southern Germany, Claudia Knab-Vispo always had an affinity for the outdoors. While ecology doesn’t run in the family – her father was a mechanical engineer and her mother was a secretary – her fondest memories of childhood revolve around activities such as hiking, skiing, sailing, horses, gardening and “just being outside.”
“I always loved to be with trees, watch flowers, insects, and birds, but the formal study of plants came in university,” she says. A passion for connecting with the outdoors and a curiosity to learn more about living beings in general led her to study biology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet in Munich where she earned the equivalent of a master’s degree. Her thesis “Habitat Suitability Model for Chamois, Rupicapra rupicapra, in the Bavarian Alps” was a first foray into the interaction between wildlife (chamois is a species of wild goat) and plants.
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
Top left, managing the beetle bank at the Farm Hub. Bottom left a mix of native plants and flowers as part of the Native Meadow Trial . Right, Knab-Vispo with Jessica Karmell an intern with Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program in 2023.
Her curiosity and joy of exploration took her to far reaching places. After graduating from university, she spent two years as a research assistant in a rainforest in Borneo, Indonesia where she collected data on plant-animal interactions for a Harvard professor.
“During my studies and a two-year internship in the tropics, I became fascinated by the beauty, diversity, and importance of plants in our world,” she says. The time in Borneo inspired her to pursue a Ph.D. that focused on the tropics.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison Knab-Vispo met her husband Conrad Vispo, a wildlife biologist, with whom she shares a love of field research and a commitment to biodiversity conservation. Together, they spent most of the 1990s in Venezuela, initially associated with the Wildlife Conservation Society and later as employees of the Venezuelan educational and research institution Fundacion La Salle. They conducted research in the remote Caura Reserve with several Venezuelan colleagues, Knab-Vispo wrote her Ph.D. thesis about the use of the rain forest by the Indigenous Ye’kwana people, and they co-edited a volume of the scientific journal Scientia Guianae entitled “Plants and Vertebrates of the Caura’s Riparian Corridor: Their Biology, Use and Conservation.”
Top left, Claudia and her younger brother Mathis Knab in the late 60s on a family hike in Germany’s Black Forest. Top right, Claudia conducting plant inventory in a natural area. From bottom left, New England Asters, Claudia monitoring the vegetation in a seeded pollinator meadow at Overmountain Conservation Area in Ancram, NY and Claudia assisting her husband Conrad Vispo quantifying the butternut squash harvest in an agroecology experiment at the Hudson Valley Farm Hub. Select photos provided by Claudia Knab-Vispo.
In 2001 their son was born, and they moved back to the U.S. to settle close to Conrad’s family here in the Hudson Valley. They initiated the Farmscape Ecology Program at Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, NY, which they now coordinate together with their colleague Anna Duhon. Knab-Vispo is responsible for the botanical research, the native plant garden, and botany-themed outreach. She also supervises botany interns who usually spend a summer or semester with the Farmscape Ecology Program. Her work tries to address questions such as: “What are the synergies between farming and native plant conservation”? and “How can we make our farms and backyards more friendly for pollinators and other beneficials”?
At the Farm Hub the couple was instrumental in initiating the Applied Farmscape Ecology Program and the associated multi-institutional Research Collaborative. Together, they developed and are overseeing the Native Meadow Trial, a research project now in its seventh year that examines the effects of creating meadows on previously tilled farmland.
After more than three decades of botanical field research, the spark and light in her eyes continues to burn bright when she is in her element – monitoring the wildflowers and grasses and tracking their growth. She believes strongly in paying it forward to the next generation. “One of the most rewarding aspects of my work is to open young peoples’ eyes to the beauty and diversity of the natural world, encourage them to become familiar with it, and showing them that they can make a career out of their love for nature,” she says.
Q & A with Claudia
I have been working at the Farm Hub each summer since 2015, when my husband (Conrad Vispo) and I were first invited to the farm to conduct a preliminary ecological inventory. That year, we created a habitat map and species lists of the wild-growing plants and animals living in the fields, forests, and wetlands of the Farm Hub.
I am the botanist at the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program. My work involves coordinating plant inventories in a variety of habitats (for example, forests, shrublands, wetlands, meadows, and farmland) in Columbia County and the wider Hudson Valley; teaching people about plants through public ecology walks, customized programs, our website, a blog, and social media; and creating and maintaining a native plant garden at Hawthorne Valley, as well as other pollinator-friendly plantings in different places.
In 2017, I had the opportunity to participate in an experiment with seeding different native meadows on former corn fields. We wanted to learn if it was possible to establish native meadows without the use of herbicides, which native wildflowers and grasses grow best here at the Farm Hub, which insects they attract, and how the plant and insect communities of these meadows develop over time. Every season the botany team I coordinate monitors which plants are present in the meadows and how their abundance changes over the years. We also monitor how many flowers they produce during each season and over the years. In addition, I had the opportunity to facilitate the rewilding of a wet meadow and a large, very sandy field—both areas that were not very productive agriculturally and have now been designated as natural areas on the farm. I got to choose the seeds to be planted in both areas and—again—we are documenting how the plant communities are evolving. We also created a beetle bank, which is a 1,000 feet long narrow strip of perennial vegetation, which transects a large crop field and is designed to provide a refuge and floral resources for beneficial insects.
Together with my husband, Conrad Vispo, we also offer several ecology walks each year for the staff at the Farm Hub, so that the people intimately familiar with the agricultural production on the farm have the opportunity to learn more about the wild plants and animals that live on the land and about their interactions with farm production.
I love the natural world and enjoy being outside. I initially majored in biology with a concentration in wildlife biology and botany. During my studies and a two-year internship in the tropics, I became fascinated by the beauty, diversity, and importance of plants in our world.
I really have found my dream job and have been able to do that for 20 years now. I conduct research about the wild plants that live in the farmscape here in the Hudson Valley with us and share what I learn with people of all ages and walks of life. With that work, I hope to help people connect more with the natural world and to become better stewards of the land and the other-than-human-life it harbors.
Much hiking and other outdoor activities growing up set me on a path to become a field biologist. I chose to focus on plants, because they are relatively easy to study – they don’t move, so you don’t need to catch them to have a good look. They are always there, so you don’t have to get up early to study them. And I have fewer ethical quandaries around handling and collecting plants, compared to doing the same with animals.
I love the thrill of exploration and going into a new study area, for example the floodplain forest here at the Farm Hub and not knowing which plants I’ll find. (I love) discovering a plant that I have never seen before and figuring out which species it is, where else it lives, and what role it plays in the larger ecological community. And I love to help people open their eyes to the diversity and beauty of the wild creatures, plants and animals, sharing the land with us.
I feel that there are a lot of women interested in botany. Every year, most applicants for the botany summer internship are women. Some of them have gone on to pursue graduate studies in botany or do practical work creating gardens with native plants.
Try to get a lot of different experiences in different parts of the country/world, in different ecosystems/habitats, with different groups of organisms (plants/animals) and in different contexts (research, management, outreach). Try to find your passion and role models. But also, make sure to take care of yourself along the way. Allow for time-off, play, and physical exercise; the cultivation of friendships and community; and plenty of sleep. And most importantly allow yourself to see the beauty and hope in the midst of all that is not well.
“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” ― Aldo Leopold, 1949, Foreword, A Sand County Almanac.
“In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013, Braiding Sweetgrass
Resources
Click here for Claudia Knab-Vispo’s research page.