The Plant Press

Funk Receives the 2018 Asa Gray Award

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2018.

Adapted from ASPT News Blog

The American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT) has selected Vicki Funk as its 2018 Asa Gray Award recipient. The prestigious award—named after arguably the most influential North American Botanist of the 19^th century—recognizes lifetime achievement in plant systematics.

Vicki Funk, 2018 Asa Gray awardee with American Society of Plant Taxonomists president Chelsea Specht (left) and Dennis Stevenson. (photo by Jason Cantley)

Funk was selected for the award following nominations and supporting letters submitted from 18 botanical and systematic experts. The primary nominators—Dennis Stevenson, Chelsea Specht, and Warren Wagner—indicate that “Dr. Funk epitomizes the most meritorious type of scientist for the Asa Gray award: an indefatigable and innovative evolutionary biologist, a field and herbarium botanist, a pure taxonomist, and an enthusiastic mentor.” In support of Funk, they continue, “Her career hallmarks include prolific and transformative research, innovations to the ways we do systematic botany … significant contributions to plant taxonomy rules and regulations, mentoring of a continuous stream of young botanists, and contributing to the excellence of [ASPT] and its mission in promoting plant systematics and plant taxonomy.”

Indeed, the hallmarks of Funk’s career are noteworthy, including more than 200 peer-reviewed papers and as an editor/author on nine collaborative books. One of these, Systematics, Evolution, and Biogeography of Compositae (2009), is a prominent tome that brought together virtually all the researchers of the world’s largest plant family. The book was the winner of the prestigious Stebbins Medal, demonstrating its high international praise. Funk has also produced many seminal papers on topics such as phylogenetic patterns and hybridization (1985), the highly regarded how-to book The Compleat Cladist (1991), systematic data in biodiversity studies (2002), and the first book using modern phylogenetic approaches in a standardized way to address biogeography on oceanic islands (Hawaiian Biogeography, 1995). For all of the nominators, it is clear that Funk’s name is not only synonymous with Island Biogeography, but her momentous work has also systematically built the foundations on which many plant researcher’s careers have flourished.

Herbarium is Destination for Summer Schools

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2018.

The US National Herbarium typically attracts visiting research scientists interested in examining specimens in their field of study. The herbarium also serves as a destination in education. Undergraduate and graduate students interested in botany, ecology, evolution, molecular biology, and conservation biology have visited the herbarium to understand the importance of museum collections and how the specimens are used in research. This past summer several groups visited the herbarium. Here are two examples.

The second Oak Spring eFLOWER Summer School took place at the Oak Spring Foundation in Upperville, Virginia on September 18–27. The main goal of this Summer School was to provide high-quality training in modern comparative methods used to study macroevolution. The organizers, Hervé Sauquet, Susana Magallón, Jürg Schönenberger, and Peter Crane, hoped that this Summer School would further promote the rapidly evolving field of macroevolution in plant sciences while also conveying their experience in building high-quality morphological datasets. They also sought to inspire the participants to take part in the quest to understand the evolution of angiosperms and their flowers. Using the program PROTEUS, the School included lectures and hands on experience in floral trait data, ancestral state reconstruction, characteristics of early floral diversification, fossil calibration data entry, molecular dating and fossil data entry.

Vicki Funk (center) with participating students of the Oak Spring eFLOWER Summer School. (photo by Hervé Sauquet)

As part of the Summer School the 15 participants and three of their instructors traveled into Washington, DC, on September 23 and spent a day at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). During part of that time, they spent several hours touring the herbarium and having an open discussion about relevant topics such as the importance of biological collections, best practices in collecting samples, and the future of systematics. Participants attended from Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Mexico, UK, and the USA (Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin). Invited speakers included Else Marie Friis, Laura Lagomarsion, and Stacey Smith, and from the US National Herbarium, Vicki Funk.

Each summer, the Blandy Experimental Farm of the University of Virginia hosts a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, a residential, 11-week summer program supported by the National Science Foundation. The primary goal of the program is to teach students to formulate testable hypotheses about important ecological and evolutionary questions. The format of the program encourages students to develop skills in experimental design, data collection, analysis, and critical reading of primary scientific literature. Students also learn to prepare and communicate scientific information to other scientists and the general public.

REU undergraduate students from Blandy Experimental Farm (and also a few graduate students, faculty, and technicians) visited the US National Herbarium over the summer.

A feature of the Blandy program is to visit the NMNH to understand the importance of biological collections and how it might relate to their research. On July 13, nine participants and one of their instructors, Mary McKenna (Howard University), had the opportunity to visit the Departments of Botany and Vertebrate Zoology. Gary Krupnick gave a presentation and discussion on how botanical specimens are used in conservation research followed by a tour of the herbarium.

Observing the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day: the Common Poppy

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2018.

November 11, 2018, is Veteran’s Day and the 100^th anniversary of Armistice Day. Armistice Day is commemorated to mark the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany for the end of fighting on the Western Front of World War I. The armistice took effect in 1918 at eleven o'clock in the morning—the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.” Veteran’s Day, the official United States public holiday to honor military veterans, coincides with Armistice Day and Remembrance Day (also known as Poppy Day), a memorial day observed by the British Commonwealth of Nations member states to remember the members of the armed forces who have died in the line of duty.

Papaver rhoeas (photo by Gary Houston [CC0], from Wikimedia Commons)

The common poppy, Papaver rhoeas, is worn in many countries on Armistice Day in order to commemorate those who lost their lives during warfare. The poppy became the symbol of remembrance soon after the publication of “In Flanders Fields,” a war poem written by Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. The poem gives reference to the red poppies that grew over the graves of fallen soldiers:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Papaver rhoeas, an annual herbaceous species in the Papaveraceae, has a long-lived soil seed bank that readily germinates in disturbed soils. The plant was readily observed blooming on the battlefields during the war. The species is believed to be native to southern Europe, North Africa, and temperate Asia, but has become naturalized outside of this range.

A specimen of Papaver rhoeas collected in 1910 by Herman Knoche in Montpellier, France.

The U.S. National Herbarium has databased nine specimens of Papaver rhoeas from its collections. These specimens range from Lebanon and Iraq to Spain and the Canary Islands, and they date from the 1890s to the 1970s. The specimen shown here was collected on 19 May 1910 by American botanist Herman Knoche in Montpellier, France.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2018.

Alex White

Alex White is a post-doctoral fellow with a joint appointment in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and the Data Science Lab in the Smithsonian Office of Information. White is working with Laurence Dorr and Eric Schuettpelz at NMNH and Rebecca Dikow in the Data Science Lab on developing machine learning models for evaluating global scale patterns of trait diversity in digitized herbarium collections. White recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago where he studied the ecological and evolutionary drivers of Himalayan bird diversity gradients with a particular focus on biogeography. His research broadly concerns developing computational methods for combining local community data with macroscale data to evaluate contemporary and historical limits on diversity.