The Plant Press

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.

Honors & Awards

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

Marcelo Pace and Andrew Rozefelds received an award in recognition of their recent paper describing the discovery of the first wood fossil of Vitaceae in the Southern Hemisphere. The Journal of Systematics and Evolution presents awards annually to recognize the papers published in JSE with important impact in systematics and evolution. The paper “The first record of fossil Vitaceae wood from the Southern Hemisphere, a new combination for Vitaceoxylon ramunculiformis, and reappraisal of the fossil record of the grape family (Vitaceae) from the Cenozoic of Australia” <https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jse.12300> has won the JSE Outstanding Papers award.

External appearance of the permineralized stem of the fossil Austrovideira dettmannae. Note tessellate bark with vertically oriented fissures, similar to modern grape vines.