The Plant Press

Awards & Honors

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 2021.

The National Museum of Natural History presented the 2020 Peer Recognition Awards on January 28, 2021. Award recipients are individuals and teams who have given their time and talent to the museum above and beyond what their jobs call for, and to those who have done something that makes a difference in the outside community, for the museum, or for the larger Smithsonian community. The Peer Recognition Award Committee is composed of 10 Museum staff members representing a cross-section of the entire museum community.

Twelve awards were presented during the online Zoom ceremony, hosted by Kirk Johnson (Sant Director of the National Museum of Natural History) and Bob Corrigan (Office of the Deputy Director). Two members of the Department of Botany were proud recipients of 2020 Peer Recognition Awards.

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The Treasurer and Secretary Team Award

Gary Krupnick (Department of Botany) and Briana Pobiner (Department of Anthropology) accept the Treasurer and Secretary Team Award at the virtual 2020 Peer Recognition Award ceremony.

Serving as the treasurer of the Senate of Scientists (SOS) for the last six years and secretary for the last seven, Gary Krupnick (Department of Botany) and Briana Pobiner (Department of Anthropology), respectively, have gone above and beyond even their volunteer SOS duties in the last year. The Senate’s activities—from business meetings to lightning talks and dinner forums—run as smoothly as they do because of the dedication and efficiency of these two colleagues. Keeping vital channels of communication flowing, handling countless details, and transitioning to online activities are only some of the challenges that they have made look easy. The Senate and the museum community has benefited greatly from their leadership and dedication.

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The Digitization Hero Award

Sue Lutz accepts the Digitization Hero Award at the virtual 2020 Peer Recognition Award ceremony.

Since the museum’s closure in March 2020, Sue Lutz (Department of Botany) has had the enormous responsibility of completing most necessary Botany Collection work that must be done in the building. In addition to ensuring the safety of the collections and keeping up with tasks normally assigned to everyone, she volunteered to continue prepping specimen folders for the mass digitization conveyor belt project. The project had been up and running since July but was slowly running out of prepared material to image. Because of her efforts the project will be able to continue on schedule to the delight of botanists and researchers around the globe.

“E.D.” and the elusive Bidens

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 2021.

By Julia Beros.

Sitting on a 5-acre green space and playground in Cooper’s Poynt Waterfront Park in Camden, New Jersey is a public art piece called Camden Turntable. SLO Architecture used discarded plastic bottles and facemasks to build Turntable. (photo by Andreas Symietz)

Here is a new lawn of grass; which means here also are clovers and violets, arabidopsis, interloping purslane, a line of cherry trees, stalky earthbound lamiales, some broadleaf plantains, sagewort, and some type of vetch. “My brother operates that type of crane at his job,” he begins as he points across the grassy lawn to fields of industry, spotted with clusters of these cranes sprouting upward as they lattice the sky with their branching arms appointed with yellow hooks that sway gently in the wind. The points hang downward like the achened barb awns of Bidens bidentoides, burrs ready to claw their way into a new spot of dirt.

Bidens bidentoides along a freshwater intertidal shore. (photo by Timothy G. Howard, courtesy of New York Natural Heritage Program)

“He once saw a new guy lift a shipping container up for the first time,” the story continues, “but he forgot to lock it properly and it tipped in the air. One by one, brand new BMW cars came sprinkling out.” He bobs his head in dismay at the very story he has surely told before and continues on his walk around the park leaving our conversation as seamlessly as he entered. I look out to the edge of the bike path and watch the waves of the Delaware River like pleats unfolding as they enter New Jersey. Now the site of a 5-acre green space and playground, Cooper’s Poynt park in Camden, was once the site of a jail, and before then a site of growing industry in a push to increase the use of these ports. And before that this was the site where Elias Diffenbaugh plucked a branching cluster of yellow-topped Bidens bidentoides just before their achenes could sprinkle to the ground. While on site installing a public art piece invoking the history of the changing ports and illegal industrial dumping, attracting the attention of park-goers and passersby, I wondered too about the ecological history of this site defined by urbanization: how has this landscape been defined by botany?

“Beggarticks,” or just Bidens, is an estuarine composite genus with a wide temperate and tropical global distribution. Bidens bidentoides is an increasingly rare species confined to just a straggling few pockets of tidal marsh in the Northeastern United States: the Delaware estuary, the Hudson estuary, and (somewhat debatably) the Chesapeake estuary. In a genus with a diversity described as “chaotic,” B. bidentoides itself made its way through three name revisions, described first by Nuttall as Diodonta bidentoides, then revised as Coreopsis by Torrey and Gray, and finally landing in Bidens under Britton’s description. A plant that grows in mostly disturbed areas, often observed growing among detritus and decaying wood, this species is distinguished from other local ones by its lack of ray florets, simple lanceolate leaves, and antrorsley barbed awns (Smith 2014). As its seed dispersal is adapted to local diffusion near the parent plant, B. bidentoides’ greatest threat is habitat destruction. Clusters of remaining plants remain isolated from each other as well, diminishing the gene diversity which could heighten the vulnerability of this species to extirpation.

By the numbers

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 2021.

The staff of the Department of Botany continues to make a strong push to make the U.S. National Herbarium’s collection of over 5 million specimens available online. The Botany Specimen Catalog is available at https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany/?ti=2. As the current pandemic continues, Botany staff sequestered in their homes continue to accomplish the goals of a fully accessible catalog of specimens. Below are some notable numbers and figures from the digitization project:

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4.14 million

The number of catalog records online

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3.6 million

The number of catalog images

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577,000 and 635,000

The number of catalog records and images, respectively, added in 2020

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95%

The percentage of all pressed sheets that have a catalog record

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325,000

The number of cryptogam (lichens and bryophytes) catalog records coming online soon

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Top 5

The country with the most collections is the United States, followed by Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru

Maria A. Faust (1930-2021)

From the forthcoming Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 3, July 2021.

Dr. Maria Anna Faust, research botanist emerita from the Department of Botany, passed away on April 24, 2021 at the age of 91 from medical complications related to stroke.

Faust specialized in tropical marine dinoflagellate taxonomy and ecology. Born in Hungary, she received a BA (1951) from the Agricultural University of Budapest. Shortly after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, she fled to Yugoslavia with her husband and infant daughter. There they lived in a refugee camp for 20 months before immigrating to the United States. She then earned her MS (1962) in microbiology at Rutgers University and her PhD (1970) in aquatic microbiology at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Maria Faust, 2010. (photo by the Smithsonian Institution)

Faust began her Smithsonian career at the Radiation Biology Laboratory (SRBL) in Rockville, MD in 1973. After this laboratory was closed and staff reassigned, she worked at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, MD and ultimately joined in 1987 the Botany Department, National Museum of Natural History-Museum Support Center in Suitland, MD, where she worked until her retirement in 2009. In her 40 year career, she published over 120 research papers. Her most notable publication is “Identifying Harmful Marine Dinoflagellates” (Contributions from the United States National Herbarium 42: 1-144; 2002). In 2004, Faust received the Award of Excellence by the Phycological Society of America. And in 2010, she was a co-recipient of the Tyge Christensen Award for the best paper published in Phycologia in 2009 for a monograph on the toxic dinoflagellate genus Gambierdiscus.

Faust was a mentor and a great source of inspiration for many microbiologists and phytoplankton taxonomists, not just those starting their scientific research but also those well established in their careers. Her microscope skills (Scanning Electron Microscope, light and dissecting) were impressive, detailed, and artistic. Her eagerness to share her knowledge and passion for dinoflagellate research has left a lasting impression on many. Her wisdom, kindness, and eagerness to help others will always be remembered.

Faust, predeceased by her husband Dr. Miklos Faust, is survived by her daughter, Judit Quasney and son-in-law Thomas Quasney of Silver Spring, MD, her grandchildren, Evan Quasney of Mercer Island, WA, Daniel Quasney of Washington, DC, and two great grandchildren.