The Plant Press

Art by Alice Tangerini: Erato costaricensis E. Moran & V.A. Funk

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 1, January 2020.

Known only from Costa Rica and Panama, Erato costaricensis (Compositae) grows in wet forest, forested hillsides, and along roadsides. This illustration is representative of Vicki Funk’s passion for mentoring young scientists, especially women, and work in the family she studied during her career, Compositae, especially in Latin America. The research paper, published in Systematic Botany (31: 597-609; 2006 https://doi.org/10.1600/036364406778388728), was done by Emily Moran as part of the Research Training Program at the National Museum of Natural History, which was funded by the National Science Foundation. Alice Tangerini illustrated this drawing in polycarbonate pencil on drafting film to match the media of a previous drawing, Erato polymnioides, completed in 1976.

Science Achievement Award presented to Botany staff

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 1, January 2020.

The National Museum of Natural History began awarding Science Achievement Awards in 2003. The awards recognize exceptional scientific publications in natural history. On November 21, 2019, in close consultation with the museum’s Senate of Scientists, an interdisciplinary review committee recognized the outstanding work of staff scientists for five publications, each published in 2017. Awards for publications from 2018 and 2019 will be announced later this year.

Among the awards, Eric Schuettpelz, Rebecca Dikow, Sylvia Orli, Vicki Funk, and Laurence Dorr received recognition for their paper, “Applications of deep convolutional neural networks to digitized natural history collections” (Biodiversity Data Journal 5: e21139; http://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.5.e21139).

NMNH Sant Director Kirk Johnson presents one of five 2017 Science Achievement Awards to Sylvia Orli, Eric Schuettpelz, Warren Wagner (accepting on behalf of Vicki Funk), Rebecca Dikow, and Laurence Dorr. (photo by Lucia RM Martino, Smithsonian Institution)

Illustration intern has a productive fall semester

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 1, January 2020.

Alice Tangerini hosted Jacquelyn McPeck, an intern acquired through the Smithsonian’s Office of Fellowships and Internships’ (OFI) partnership with Whitworth University, for the fall semester September 13 through December 13, 2019. Though McPeck’s major is Biology, she has an interest in Horticulture and two-dimensional art media. She came highly recommended.

Alice Tangerini with intern Jacquelyn McPeck. (photo by Ken Wurdack)

McPeck expressed an interest and had knowledge of working in Adobe Photoshop and came at just the opportune time to work on a project for Harold Robinson involving Edith Scott, former Research Associate in the Botany Department.

McPeck’s first project was to scan and rework the photographs, diagrams, and maps for Scott’s dissertation on “The Protosalvinia from Kentucky,” a paper on Devonian fossils originally submitted to George Washington University in 1980. Scott’s major professor was Francis Huber, former Paleobiology Curator at the National Museum of Natural History. The dissertation had never been published online. McPeck scanned and enhanced the old faded photographs and redrew maps using online models and old photocopies of Scott’s maps. McPeck finished this project in record time, impressing even Robinson.

McPeck followed up the initial project and continued by scanning a series of old botanical drawings that were waiting to be inventoried. One of these included a 1922 oil painting of a Ferocactus (discovered in the herbarium) covered with dust spots and stains which required removal in the scan. She also rescanned all of the Funk Werneria drawings at a higher resolution for optimum publication, and meticulously rehoused the illustrations in archival folders.

McPeck was actively working on an illustration of a species of Perityle for Botany researcher, Isaac Marck, during her last week at the museum.

Searching for holy wood in the dry forests of Colombia

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 1, January 2020.

By Betsy Collins

I recently spent two unforgettable weeks collecting in the tropical dry forests of Barranquilla, Santa Marta, and the Cauca River valley in Colombia for my doctoral research on the phylogeography of the dry forest specialist tree, Bursera graveolens (palo santo, holy wood). Other than its deliciously scented essential oils and funky fruit, what makes palo santo in particular so interesting to study?

Left: Essential oil dripping from a cut in the bark of a Bursera graveolens tree in Piura, Peru. Right: Palo santo fruit are dehiscent drupes. Fruits are green when unripe, and then turn red and the capsule dehisces, exposing a red pseudaril covering the black pyrene. (photo by Betsy Collins)

Palo santo as currently described has a wide range, from Mexico, Central America (except Belize and Panama), Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador (including the Galapagos), and Peru, although I hypothesize that it consists of multiple, distinct species. This widespread distribution is unique amongst dry forest specialist trees, which makes palo santo an ideal candidate for studying the evolutionary processes that formed the tropical dry forest biome, and whether these processes differ between Mesoamerican and South American dry forest.

One of my goals was to sample (almost) all the major tropical dry forest patches that palo santo occurs in, which is no small logistical feat!