The Plant Press

Art by Alice Tangerini: Prunus polystachya (Hook.f.) Kalkman

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

Prunus polystachya (Rosaceae) is a tree that grows up to 35 m high with deeply hollowed leaf glands. A species from the Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia region, it has the common name "bat's laurel", yet field observations show pollination by hover flies. Alice Tangerini drew this illustration of Prunus polystachya for a forthcoming Prunus taxonomic revision. It was pointed out to Tangerini the importance of the arrangement of stamens in the flower, so a longitudinal section of the flower was included to show the arrangement.

Staff activities

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

From February 1 to March 17, Robert Soreng traveled to South Africa and Lesotho to collect grasses and study high elevation grasslands in the Mulati-Drakensberg Mountains with Steven Sylvester (Nanjing Forestry University, China), Mitsy Sylvester, and Vincent Ralph Clark (University of the Free State, South Africa). The team made over 350 collections of grasses from 41 genera. Sets were left for the South African National Biodiversity Institute (PRE) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Bews Herbarium (NU); the U.S. National Herbarium (US) set is expected to be shipped to Plant Protection and Quarantine (PPQ). They also conducted vegetation surveys of over 220 plots. The team visited PRE herbarium in mid-March. Soreng flew home early to the United States from South Africa the day before the airports closed down due to travel bans related to the COVID-19 virus. The Sylvester family is stuck in South Africa indefinitely.

Drakensberg Mountains, South Africa, with a view of Sentinel Peak (right) and Devil’s Toothpick, (narrow pinnacle in center). A botanical team made over 350 collections of grasses from this area, a place that was used in filming the fictional land of Wakanda in the 2018 movie Black Panther.

New faces

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

Richie Hodel started as a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow in the Botany Department in January 2020. Hodel is working with Jun Wen and Liz Zimmer to use phylogenomic approaches and collections-based deep learning technologies to resolve phylogeny, assess ancient polyploidy, and infer the biogeographic history of Prunus (Rosaceae). Hodel studied the comparative phylogeography of Neotropical mangroves (genera Avicennia, Laguncularia, Rhizophora) for his doctoral work at the University of Florida with Doug and Pam Soltis, completed in 2017. He recently finished his first postdoctoral appointment at the University of Michigan with Lacey Knowles and Stephen Smith studying the comparative phylogeography of montane sedges (genus Carex), and working on phylogenomic methods development. His research interests include the comparative phylogeography of island taxa, biogeography and niche evolution, and tropical-to-temperate transitions.

The Digitized State Plants of America

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

The Maryland postcard, represented by the state flower Black-Eyed-Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), is just one of 51 postcards made by the Smithsonian Digitization Program Office (DPO). Each postcard features a specimen from each state of the USA and the District of Columbia. The specimens were digitized as part of the Herbarium Digitization Project by DPO and the National Museum of Natural History.

Smithsonian Learning Lab has uploaded a set of postcards created by the Digitization Program Office (DPO). Each state and the District of Columbia is represented by a herbarium sheet of a plant collected in that state. The postcards are available at http://learninglab.si.edu/q/ll-c/oMrY7y1Wdt46GRwC. These were made possible through the herbarium digitization project done at the National Museum of Natural History in partnership between the museum and the DPO. As of March 2020, the U.S. National Herbarium has digitized 3.7 million plant specimens, which are free to view and download from the Botany Collections webpage at https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany/.