The Plant Press

In memoriam: Jerome McDonald

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2020.

By Erika Gardner

Jerome McDonald volunteering in the Fossil Lab – always with a smile. (photo by Abby Telfer)

On May 7, 2020, the Department of Botany lost a dedicated and amazing plant mounting volunteer, Jerome McDonald. He started volunteering at the National Museum of Natural History in 2005. During his time at the museum, he served a variety of volunteer roles. He first started with mounting plant specimens for Botany under the training and supervision of Katherine Rankin. In 2008, he participated in the training program to prepare fossils in the fossil lab for the Department of Paleobiology. He was an integral part of the Thursday plant mounting group, along with his wife Zelda McDonald. In 2018, unrelenting health issues put his volunteering appointments on hold. Zelda also took time off from volunteering to assist Jerome with his medical needs.

During Jerome’s time in Botany, he was always sharing intriguing and captivating stories. He was full of worldly knowledge and enjoyed traveling. He was also an avid cross-stitcher and a needle point enthusiast. His attention to fine details and meticulousness was evident in his needle work. It was always a treat when he would share his works of art with us. His artistic skills transpired in the specimen preparation realm. His plant specimen preparations always looked like works of art. Jerome also took to the finer things in life; he was a connoisseur of cocktails, food, and cigars. He had a fantastic sense of humor and was always armed with a fun joke or story to tell. We will miss his contributions of beautifully mounted specimens as well as his jovial laugh and kind spirit.

Alice Tangerini receives the Jill Smythies Award from the Linnean Society

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2020.

Smithsonian botanical illustrator Alice Tangerini is the proud recipient of the Linnean Society’s 2020 Jill Smythies Award. The award is given to a botanical artist for outstanding, diagnostically relevant published illustrations. The award is given to an artist “in recognition of excellence in published illustrations in aid of plant identification, with the emphasis on botanical accuracy and the accurate portrayal of diagnostic characteristics.” The award was established in 1986 by the late Bertram 'Bill' Smythies in honor of his wife, the late Florence Mary ‘Jill’ Smythies, a botanical illustrator whose career as was cut short by an accident to her right hand. The Linnean Society is the world’s oldest active biological society.

Tangerini has been the botanical illustrator of the Department of Botany at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History since 1972. She has illustrated over 1,000 plant species. Her illustrations are created using pen and ink or brush with ink, and more recently digital painting. To date, Tangerini remains the only permanent staff botanical illustrator ever hired by the Smithsonian.

In May, the Linnean Society of London announced via Twitter that Alice Tangerini is the recipient of the 2020 Jill Smythies Award. https://twitter.com/LinneanSociety/status/1265297204677402626

Tangerini will be presented with the award by the president of the Linnean Society at their anniversary meeting in its rooms at Burlington House in London where the Society resides. While the anniversary meeting is traditionally held on Linnaeus’s birthday on 24 May, the date has been rescheduled to early December 2020 because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Previous recipients of the Jill Smythies Award include Deborah Lambkin (2019), Niki Simpson and Juliet Williamson (2018), and Karin Douthit and David Williamson (2017).

ForestGEO data key to the development and testing of the NGEE-Tropics’ FATES model

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2020.

A new paper in Biogeosciences (17: 3017-3044; 2020) is the first to describe FATES (Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator), a new Vegetation Demographic Model that, when operated within Earth System Models, will improve predictions of the future structure and function of tropical forests, including whether tropical forests will serve as carbon sinks or sources over the next century. In this publication researchers tested the new FATES model against data from the ForestGEO 50-ha plot on Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in Panama. The BCI data set spans nearly 40 years and includes eight censuses of all trees greater than 1 cm diameter (DBH – diameter at breast height) providing an ideal testbed for the development of FATES.

11 partner institutions lead the NGEE-Tropics project, with many more in supporting roles. (image from https://ngee-tropics.lbl.gov/partners-collaborators/)

A fully operational and tested version of FATES is the end goal of NGEE-Tropics (Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment - Tropics), a ten year, $100 million project that aims to create a representative, process-rich tropical forest ecosystem model. NGEE-Tropics is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy with principal collaboration among five national labs, several federal agencies, and ForestGEO.

NGEE-Tropics collaborators have said that “[m]ost earlier Earth System Models treated tropical forests simply as layers of big leaves without resolving the size-structure, functional diversity, and competitive dynamics that exert large effects on ecosystem process responses to environmental change.” But tropical forests are not as simple as a uniform pile of leaves. They have incredibly high species diversity, and there’s virtually no species overlap between tropical forests of the Amazon, the Congo, and Southeast Asia. Complex feedback loops between forests and the atmosphere, which are being exacerbated by changing climatic conditions, further complicate modeling.

Researchers split the birdcatcher trees (genus Pisonia) into three

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2020.

-Adapted from Pensoft

The birdcatcher trees – genus Pisonia – are infamous for trapping birds with their super-sticky seed pods that would frequently entangle the body of the ‘victim’. Left flightless, the poor feathered creatures eventually die either from starvation or fatigue, or predators. Similarly notorious are the birdcatcher trees for botanists, who have been baffled by their complicated classification for the last three centuries. 

Large cabbage trees (Pisonia grandis) dominate the landscape of a small island in the Pacific Ocean. (photo by Jean-Yves Meyer, Délégation à la Recherche de Polynésie Française, Tahiti, French Polynesia)

Smithsonian Research Associate Marcos A. Caraballo-Ortiz and graduate student Elson Felipe Rossetto (Universidade Estadual de Londrina, Brazil) are working to untangle the classification of these trees. A recently published paper appears in the open-access scholarly journal PhytoKeys (152: 121-136; 2020).

The authors of the paper reestablished two genera: Ceodes and Rockia, where both had been previously merged under the name of Pisonia. Now, as a result, there are three distinct lineages of birdcatcher trees from the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans: Ceodes, Pisonia, and Rockia (Nyctaginaceae).

“Previous molecular studies on Pisonia species from around the world showed that species were clustered into three major groups, and here we assign names for each of them. With this new classification, a large number of the species known as Pisonia will be henceforth named Ceodes. This includes the Parapara (Ceodes brunoniana) and the birdlime (Ceodes umbellifera) trees, both native to many islands, including Hawaii and New Zealand. They are commonly planted in gardens for their lush and sometimes variegated foliage, as well as their fragrant white flowers. However, the cabbage tree (Pisonia grandis) will still be technically known as Pisonia,” adds the study’s lead author Felipe Rossetto.