The Plant Press

Highlights from a winter after-school botanical workshop

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 2020.

On the 16^th, 23^rd, and 30^th of January, and the 6^th of February, a botany after-school workshop was led by Gabe Johnson, Liz Zimmer, Richie Hodel, Mónica Carlsen-Krause, Shruti Dube, Steven Canty, Erika Gardner, Julia Steier, Alice Tangerini, Marcos Caraballo Ortiz, Aleksander Radosavljevic, Nicole Webster, Heather Richardson, Juan Pablo Hurtado Padilla, and Lee Coykendall in the Q?rius Science Education Center at the National Museum of Natural History. This class was an introduction to botany for local teenagers across the greater Washington, DC metro area. The overarching theme of the class was 'orphaned' crops and floristic changes incurred by global climate change. The workshop was focused around Araceae because it contains a number of understudied crop plants that are grown in areas threatened by sea level rise.

Students from a winter botany after school workshop visit the U.S. Botanic Garden to identify a number of aroids using a dichotomous key. (photo by Lee Coykendall, USBG).

On the first evening, students learned about collections-based botanical research, the value of voucher specimens, and the importance of herbaria around the world. Students received a tour of the herbarium led by Canty and Dube. During the tour, Caraballo showed his collections of parasitic plants and explained how some specimens are bottled in alcohol. Radosavljevic showed several new legume species that he described from collections housed at the US National Herbarium. Tangerini explained the process of botanical illustration using the drawings she made of Radosavljevic's new species as an example. In the Q?rius lab, students placed slices of pineapple and malanga coco (Xanthosoma sagittifolium), cooked and uncooked, onto Petri plates of gelatin to observe protease activity in the pineapple fruit and determine if such protein digesting enzymes are also present in the corm tissue of malanga coco. With a basket of local grocery store produce, the students learned the difference between a tuber, a bulb, and a corm; each student received a taro (Colocasia esculenta) or malanga coco corm to plant in a cup and watch sprout in the Q?rius growth chambers during the course of the 4-week workshop.

The following week the students received an introduction to the scientific process from a wider perspective. It was emphasized that scientific investigations are rarely a linear progression from problem and hypothesis through results and discussion; rather, science is a multifaceted approach where ideas are tested in response to discoveries made through exploration and feedback from peers in the community to address issues ranging from everyday curiosities to global social dilemmas. Examples of this holistic view of the scientific process were given by Hodel, a postdoctoral researcher who just arrived at the Smithsonian one week prior. Hodel explained the various challenges he encountered and the discoveries he made researching mangrove reproductive biology around the Florida peninsula. Returning to Araceae, the students were given a simple, six couplet dichotomous key to identify some common aroid houseplants. After doing so, the students were given two additional plants, Epipremnum aureum and Philodendron hederaceum, and were asked to rewrite the key to include these taxa. After discussing their creative solutions to this problem, each group of students was assigned a different aroid species from which to collect tissue and press a voucher specimen.

ForestGEO network welcomes three new plots

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 2020.

ForestGEO, a Smithsonian-led global network of large-scale, long-term forest research sites, is pleased to welcome three new plots to its ranks.  The Ailaoshan plot is in a montane forest in subtropical China; the Niobrara plot and the Indian Cave plot encompass the forest-prairie transition zone in Nebraska, USA.  There are now 70 ForestGEO research sites. 

Buffalo amble by on the prairie’s edge at the Niobrara plot.  (photo by Sabrina E. Russo)

Min Cao, Principal Investigator for the new Ailaoshan plot (and also for Xishuangbanna, an extant ForestGEO plot), established the site with his research and field crew teams in 2014.  They have undertaken two censuses of the 20-hectare plot and report over 44,000 free-standing stems (of plants with a diameter at breast height (dbh) ≥ 1cm) that span 104 species – the most dominant species being within the Fagaceae, Theaceae, and Lauraceae families.

Sabrina Russo has long been an active member of the ForestGEO network, notably through her mentorship at ForestGEO’s annual analytical workshops, and now as the principal investigator for Niobrara and Indian Cave.  Niobrara is a 20.16-ha plot located at the northern border of the Nebraska-South Dakota border.  The field crew finished its first census in July 2019 and noted the presence of both paper birch (Betula paperifera) and Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), a rarity for Nebraska.  The crew was poised to complete Indian Cave’s first census in the spring of 2020.  The 18.40-ha plot contains eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis), two cherry species (Prunus virginiana, P. serotina), catalpa (Catalpa speciosa), and pale dogwood (Cornus amomum). It is located in the south-east corner of the state.

Growing pains in the Type Herbarium

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 2020.

By John Boggan

If you have looked for a type specimen recently in the United States National Herbarium (US), you may have noticed that things have changed…a lot. An ongoing rearrangement of the Type Herbarium has addressed two issues: overcrowding of the collection due to growth, and a phylogenetic arrangement that has become increasingly outdated.

Among the oldest type specimens in the US collection is Banksia integrifolia. It was collected along the eastern coast of Australia (then called New Holland) by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander during Captain James Cook’s first voyage of the ship Endeavour (1768 - 1771).

A botanical type specimen is a physical specimen, usually a pressed herbarium sheet, designated by the author of a new taxon to serve as a permanent reference point for the published name. Type specimens are critical to research as they provide an unambiguous representative of the taxon, provide physical details that a written description may not, and allow subsequent researchers to study and understand how the name should be applied.

In my position as the Type Registrar, I assist the management and curation of the digital records in our Type Register and the physical specimens in our Type Herbarium, one of the largest and most important collections of type specimens in the world. Our type collection is well-documented, with each specimen verified as a type by comparison with the original literature. Our types were among the first specimens in our herbarium to be barcoded, inventoried, and photographed, a task made easier because, unlike some herbaria, our type specimens are segregated from the rest of the collection. All of our types were photographed in the 1980s and while these photos have since been superseded by digital photographs, I still occasionally refer to them on microfiche to document changes in the specimens (e.g., insect or mechanical damage) or to gather data from specimens that have since been lost (a rare occurrence, thank goodness). Under the direction of retired staff member Ellen Farr, our type collection was one of the first in the world to present both our digital records and images of our specimens online.

Analyzing tree data to prevent extinctions

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 2020.

Sara Oldfield, Co-Chair IUCN SSC Global Tree Specialist Group

This year biodiversity and climate change will be in the headlines as politicians take stock of progress towards global targets and make plans for increasing concerted action. Tree species are of fundamental importance both as elements of biodiversity and in adaptation and mitigation measures addressing climate change. One way botanists around the world are contributing their expertise to support scaled-up environmental action is through the Global Tree Assessment (GTA). This is a global effort to assess the risk of extinction faced by each and every tree species by the end of 2020. The goal is to pull together all existing data on the conservation status of tree species and add conservation assessments to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species for all previously unassessed tree species. This is a huge collaborative effort, managed and coordinated by Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) and the IUCN Global Tree Specialist Group (GTSG) working together with many national and local institutions and individuals. The Smithsonian Institution is contributing significantly to this global initiative which will be used to prioritize and significantly increase conservation efforts to ensure that no tree species goes extinct.

Talisia furfuracea (Sapindaceae) is endemic to the Guiana Shield. This species is being evaluated for its conservation status as part of the Global Tree Assessment. (photo by Pedro Acevedo-Rodríguez)

An initial task in the GTA was to produce the first global checklist of the world's tree species. This in itself was no easy feat given that plant habit is not routinely recorded in taxonomic checklists. The list of around 60,000 tree species with accepted names and country level distribution took two years to produce by consulting a range of plant databases, over 500 scientific references, and working with around 80 tree experts. The list is maintained online by BGCI as the GlobalTreeSearch database at https://www.bgci.org/resources/bgci-databases/globaltreesearch/. It remains a dynamic resource reflecting taxonomic and nomenclatural changes and is a baseline for monitoring progress towards the GTA. GlobalTreeSearch has also been connected to the World Flora Online, which is being developed as the open-access, web-based compendium of all the world’s plant species.

Evaluating the conservation status of tree species for the GTA follows the guidelines for applying the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria. Each species is assessed by considering information on its area of distribution, population size and trend, habitat, uses, and threatening factors. Herbarium specimens and collection data continue to be of primary value in carrying out conservation assessments. Wherever possible these are combined with field knowledge of botanical experts. Often there is limited information on individual tree species and further fieldwork would greatly enhance our knowledge. Nevertheless, we need to use what information is currently available rather than waiting and, at the same time, identify those species which are poorly known and in need of further research. Concerns about loss of particular areas of forest and similar indirect information can form part of the species assessment process.