WVXU: Cincinnati museum highlights preserve with UC ties

WVXU highlighted a new exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center chronicling an Ohio preserve with deep ties to the University of Cincinnati.

A Year on the Edge is a photo exhibit depicting the changing seasons at the Richard and Lucile Durrell Edge of Appalachia Preserve in southern Ohio.

The first of the sprawling 20,000-acre preserve called Lynx Prairie was saved from development with the advocacy of famed UC botanist Emma Lucy Braun, a longtime UC professor and one of the first women to receive a doctoral degree from UC. 

Braun was a professor and lifelong friend of Lucile Durrell, wife of career UC geologist Richard Durrell. The Durrells were UC geology graduates. Their bequest to the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History and the Cincinnati Nature Center in 2000 helped expand the preserve.

The exhibition also includes Braun's research tools, her plant press and a field notebook. Braun regularly used the preserve as a living laboratory for her UC students.

The exhibition opens Feb. 5 in the Museum of Natural History & Science and is free to members and included in the museum admission.

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Featured image at top: The sun rises over the Edge of Appalachia Preserve, an image featured in the new exhibition A Year on the Edge at the Cincinnati Museum Center. Photo/TJ Vissing