The Plant Press

The Plant Press newsletter transitions to online-only publication

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 1, January 2023.

By Gary Krupnick, Editor

Since 1998, The Plant Press has been the official quarterly newsletter of the U.S. National Herbarium and the Botany Department of the National Museum of Natural History. Since its inception, the newsletter has been printed and delivered free of charge to a broad international subscription base. In 2013, a companion website was launched, making full issues of The Plant Press available as PDFs online, with articles from each issue also individually blogged throughout the quarter.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, production of printed issues stopped, with online publication of the newsletter being the only viable option. After many months of thoughtful discussion following our return to the museum, the editor of The Plant Press and the Chair of the Department of Botany came to the decision to fully transition to an online-only newsletter. Printing will not resume. The January 2020 issue (Vol 23, No. 1) was the last printed issue.

Eliminating print distribution has several benefits including a reduced cost for the Smithsonian, an expedited timeline for readers to access each issue, and a lessened environmental impact saving trees and reducing waste and energy costs. Going forward, every issue will be available as a PDF for download, allowing users to print their own copy should they desire to read a hard copy of the newsletter.

The PDF newsletter still has the same sections as the print version: News, Articles, New Faces, Staff Activities, Travel, Visitors, Honor & Awards, Publications, and Botanical Illustrations. Articles appearing in the PDF newsletter and the blogged articles are identical for the most part, with some online blogged articles having more imagery and hyperlinks.

To access the newsletter online, please visit The Plant Press at https://nmnh.typepad.com/the_plant_press/. Downloadable PDFs of every issue are available under the “Printed Issues” tab at the top of the screen.

To receive quarterly PDF issues by email, please subscribe to The Plant Press listserv by sending a message to listserv@si-listserv.si.edu containing only the following in the body of the text: “SUBSCRIBE PLANTPRESS-NEWS Firstname Lastname” (replace “Firstname Lastname” with your name). Leave the subject line blank.

To have individual blog articles delivered directly to your inbox, you can now set up a subscription service for notifications. On the website, in the box in the upper right, enter your email and click “subscribe”. The new email service is powered by follow.it, which has replaced feedburner, a former service shut down by Google in 2021. Follow.it is provided free of charge and subscribers can set email delivery settings at a frequency of their choosing.

Amigos de las Gramíneas en México

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 1, January 2023.

By Paul M. Peterson and Konstantin Romaschenko

Paul Peterson, Research Botanist and Curator, has been collaborating with botanists in México for more than 37 years on taxonomic, biogeographic, and evolutionary studies of the grasses. This past fall, from 15 October to 16 November 2022, Peterson and Konstantin (Kostya) Romaschenko, Research Associate, traveled to Central México to collect specimens for numerous ongoing projects principally involving Dr. Yolanda Herrera Arrieta at Instituto Politécnico Nacional, CIIDIR Unidad Durango-COFAA in Durango and Dr. Jesus Valdés Reyna at the Universidad Autónoma Agraria Antonio Narro in Saltillo.

Muhlenbergia subg. Trichochloa near La Vuelta, Querétaro, México. (photo by Kostya Romaschenko)

The flora of México is extremely diverse, and the country ranks fourth in the world with more than 30,000 different species of flowering plants, compared to only 18,000 in the USA and 12,000 in all of Europe. The Poaceae or Gramineae are also diverse in México with more than 1,300 species. Peterson has traveled and collected more than 13,500 numbers in México on 28 expeditions, beginning in 1983 and 1984 with Robert F. Thorne and Carol Annable to the Sierra Juarez and Sierra de San Pedro Mártir in Baja California, and then throughout México in 1985 and 1986 to gather material of the annual species of Muhlenbergia in the tribe Cynodonteae for his PhD studies. If you want to work on grasses Muhlenbergia is a good choice because it is the most speciose genus in México with 130 species. The National Museum of Natural History’s previous Curator of grasses, Thomas Soderstrom worked on the tall perennial species of Muhlenbergia (subg. Trichochloa) for his PhD studies.

Art by Alice Tangerini: Vitis rotundifolia Michaux

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 4, October 2022.

Vitis rotundifolia, or muscadine, is a grape species from the southern USA commonly used as fruits or for cooking and making jelly, juice, and wine. It is a close relative of Vitis popenoei from Mexico and adjacent regions. Alice Tangerini used a variety of herbarium specimens for her drawing, taking advantage of many specimens collected by Jun Wen. Images of the living plant and fruit were numerous on the web and were used to convey a more natural appearance of Vitis in the drawing. The illustration appears in The Flora of North America: North of Mexico (Vol. 12 Magnioliophyta: Vitaceae to Garryaceae). Tangerini was challenged to reduce the drawing to a small size to fit the FNA format. The illustration was also selected for the t-shirt design by the FNA group for Botany 2016.

Summer internships

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 4, October 2022.

This summer, Sundre Winslow, an intern participating in the Natural History Research Experiences (NHRE), worked on a research project, “Tropical to Temperate Transitions in the Genus Prunus” with Richard Hodel, Jun Wen, and Elizabeth Zimmer. Winslow presented her findings at an NHRE symposium in the museum on August 4.

From June 20 to August 12, Alice Tangerini supervised summer intern to botany, Abigail (Abbey) Paradis. Paradis organized, labeled, and made folders for the hundreds of Cuatrecasas illustrations in the Botanical Art Collection, scanned 40 drawings to fulfill a request from a researcher, scanned 25 other new drawings for the Botanical Art Collection and helped scan and organize Poaceae drawings dating from the 1970s and 1980s. Using Adobe software, Paradis was able to optimize the resolution and improve images of the scans. She used Photoshop to improve digital photos for publications. She also illustrated a living specimen collected by Jason Grant from the SI Botanical Research Greenhouses that had been photographed by Leslie Brothers and vouchered but not yet identified. Her drawing, along with images of the specimens, proved it to be Commelina tuberosa from Ecuador, and has now been added to the Botanical Art Collection.