Atomic Botany: The Botanical Career of Janice Carson Beatley, and the Flora, Vegetation, and Ecology of the Nevada Test Site in Cold War United States (1959–1973)

This paper focuses on the career of Janice Carson Beatley (1918-1987), a botanist and plant ecologist, who moved into the male-dominated field of nuclear studies to investigate the flora, vegetation and ecology of the Nevada Test Site between 1959 and 1973. It examines her background, training, her employment history, and her relationship with plant ecologist John "Jack" Wolfe, who himself had accepted a position in the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1958. It explores her scientific work, which included creating an inventory of the flora and vegetation of the region, but also assessing the damage from radioactive fallout, and inferring basic ecosystem processes in this desert region, which covered parts of the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts. She made major contributions to understanding these ecosystems, especially the precise role of precipitation as an environmental trigger for the development of the vegetation. By the end, she had established some sixty-eight permanent plots and developed a herbarium of approximately 13,500 mounted specimens, many of which were deposited at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Toward the end of her work with the AEC, she became embittered by a sense of having been marginalized and not accorded proper appreciation for her scientific contributions. Her career illustrates difficulties that confronted women scientists as they attempted to establish themselves in fields dominated by men, such as nuclear energy.