Museum nest specimens are botanical time capsules containing invaluable historical information about the plants from a specific place and time when they were built. Plants identified from historical nests can unlock new information about the ecology of extinct habitats.

In this talk, Santa Clara University Biology Professor Justen Whittall describes his research on century-old nest specimens. For example, surrounding the San Francisco Bay estuary were transitional habitats - the ecological gradient between the tidal marsh and the upland. These habitats were lost during the 1900s due to human-caused land use changes, and consequently, very little is known about this former native plant community. In attempts to improve our understanding of this endangered habitat, Dr. Whittall and his team sampled ~100-year-old song sparrow and savannah sparrow nests collected along the margins of the San Francisco Bay estuary from natural history collections across the country. They were able to successfully extract DNA, perform PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction, a laboratory technique for studying DNA) and conduct DNA sequence analysis on over 200 total nest samples. From this, they have confirmed the identity of some previous plant species from the transitional habitat and added several new residents to this list.