The Plant Press

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 3 from July 2001.

David Erickson, NSF-funded postdoctoral fellow working with Elizabeth Zimmer at the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics (LMS) and Charles Fenster at the University of Maryland, is investigating QTL mapping in the legume Chamaecrista fasciculata. He hopes to use an experimental crossing design to elucidate the number and relative effects of genes that promote adaptation to different habitats.

Rachel A. Levin, a postdoctoral fellow working with Warren Wagner, Elizabeth Zimmer and Mellon fellows Peter Hoch, Jorge Crisci, and Ken Sytsma, is interested in using phylogenetic techniques to address questions about character evolution in plants, especially fragrance evolution. Levin plans to study phylogenetic relationships within Nyctaginaceae. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, Tucson, with Lucinda McDade as her advisor. Her dissertation research focused on the phylogenetic relationships among Southwestern species in the family Nyctaginaceae and the evolution of fragrance within this group of mainly hawkmoth-pollinated taxa.

There are two Botany participants in the Research Training Program this summer. Jeffery Saarela (jeff_saarela@hotmail.com) is from Manitou, Canada. He recently graduated from the University of Manitoba, and wrote an honors dissertation on the taxonomy of the Carex backii species complex. He is working with Paul Peterson on the taxonomy of Brachyelytrum erectum (Poaceae) in North America.

Also in the Research Training Program is Katarina Topalov (katia@ptt.yu), from Novi Sad, Serbia. She is currently a third year undergraduate at the University of Novi Sad, and is particularly interested in forest ecosystems and vegetation of the Fruska Gora Mountain near Novi Sad. Her research project is an evaluation of plant diversity on the Guiana Shield, under the guidance of Vicki Funk.

In the Venezuelan Paramo

From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 3 from July 2001.

In this essay, Laurence Dorr recounts his recent adventures in the Venezuelan field.

“The first sign was the patch of rabbit fur, later the scat with animal bones, and finally the half‑eaten ‘mapache,’ and I was convinced that there were puma roaming the Páramo de Guaramacal. At least the one (or ones) with whom we kept crossing paths was well fed and that lessened the anxiety that I might otherwise have felt. We also saw ample evidence of the presence of spectacled bear in the páramo. The clearest evidence of the latter were the fairly common patches of leaves left after the bear had dined on Puya aristeguietae, which conveniently for the botanist was in full flower.

“While the presence of these large mammals added some degree of excitement, the purpose of my recent trip was to collect plants in areas of Guaramacal National Park that had not been adequately explored before and to collect in seasons that had been neglected. We therefore found ourselves on top of Guaramacal in the middle of the rainy season. Civil Defense of Trujillo state lent us a large tent for use as a kitchen and pressing area, and TeleBoconó allowed us to use a small hut near their broadcast antenna where we could bunk sheltered from the wind, rain, and cold. Both tent and hut were greatly appreciated, especially since this ‘tropical’ field trip included night‑time temperatures as low as 3°C.

“We collected along a transect from the summit (3,100 m) of the Páramo de Guaramacal northeast to the Fila Los Recostaderos, essentially completing a loop that earlier had included a hike from El Cafenol to the Fila. Our little stroll in the páramo had us drop from 3,100 to 2,400 m and then climb back up the 700 m we had lost. While my rain pants, rain jacket, and poncho kept the rain from making me wet, I nonetheless became soaked by the sweat from my exertion and thoroughly exhausted by the end of the day. Another transect took us from the summit of Guaramacal southwest to the Páramo El Pumar. As with the Fila, we had also climbed last winter from about 1800 m to El Pumar at 2600 m. We did not find anything that was new on this trip. Last winter we collected quite a few plants in El Pumar that we had not seen previously in the park.

“The páramo collecting, apart from a number of parasitic Loranthaceae that could not be identified in the field, did not yield anything that was unexpected. The best collecting of this trip was above El Cafenol where we walked through a ‘potrero’ along the edge of cloud forest from about 1,700 to 2,200 m. A number of these collections, including a narrow‑leaved Piper, were species that neither I nor Basil Stergios and Miguel Niño could recall having seen before. Alas, our ‘Catalogue of the Flora of Guaramacal’ is rapidly becoming outdated. The last two trips (December‑January and June) have produced a total of 21 genera and 51 species not previously reported from Guaramacal. When all of the material is worked up we may well have records of 1,500 species of vascular plants in the park.

“Before returning to Washington, Stergios took me on a quick day-trip to see one of the last vestiges of montane vegetation in Portuguesa state. We drove northwest of Guanare, forded the Río Suruguapo, and climbed to the Fila de San José de la Montaña on the border with Lara state. Many of the plants were familiar from Guaramacal, including Croizatia brevipetiolata (Euphorbiaceae), a species that was scarcely known a few years ago but is now appearing in almost all of the cloud forests examined at 1,600 to 1,800 m.”

Art by Alice Tangerini: Pteris polita and P. deflexa

From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 3 from July 2001.

Pteris polita (left) and P. deflexa (right) have often been confused or synonymized because of their similarity in frond form. However, Pteris polita has asymmetrical, decurrent subapical pinnae and P. deflexa has symmetrical, non-decurrent subapical pinnae. Differences in rhizome diameter, basal pinnule width, and costa indument further distinguish the species. For further details, see Lellinger (1997. Amer. Fern J. 87: 66-70).

Basic Research in the Century of the Environment

From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 3 from July 2001.

Many biologists are now calling the next one hundred years the “Century of the Environment.” But has this epithet been applied because the next hundred years will be our last chance to preserve the remaining large tracts of undisturbed natural habitats on the planet? Or is it because we only have 100 years to discover the remaining organic diversity on the planet, document where it is distributed, and understand how it has evolved before the current mass extinction is complete? As natural history biologists we must decide how we are going to expend our research energies over the next decades.

Like many systematic biologists, I began my career with an intense fascination for the natural world and a passion for botanical exploration and discovery. My occupations throughout undergraduate and graduate school focused on learning everything I could about systematics, evolution, and ecology as well as traveling to as many faraway tropical lands as a graduate student could afford. I have continued this trajectory through post-docs, first jobs, and my curatorial work at the Smithsonian.

A not so subtle transition occurred in both the field of biology and my career perspective during the 1980s as the pristine tropical forests became more and more difficult to find and the forests that I had already explored were being degraded in a rapid and irreversible fashion. Not so suddenly I awoke to realize that the message on environmental crisis that Peter Raven had been preaching for years was indeed true, was global in scope, and was directly transforming the way I worked as a scientist. Not only was it a crisis of nature and society, but, selfishly, it was a personal crisis that affected the way I was able to practice tropical botany and systematics. My idealized quest for understanding the natural world was being brought to a halt by the disappearance of the very natural environments I wanted to study. Moreover, I was been forced to abandon basic research in exchange for a more proactive conservation program. It was paradoxical as well as disturbing.

Since that realization I have spent at least one-third, if not more, of my time and energy on environmental and conservation issues. This effort included conservation research as well as outreach and public relations activities to promote the conservation of tropical biodiversity. I am certainly not alone among my colleagues in the redirection of my professional efforts from scientific research to conservation advocacy. What else can we do?

Departures

From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 3 from July 2001.

Postdoctoral fellow Molly Nepokroeff has accepted an assistant professor position in the Biology Department at the University of South Dakota, Vermillion, effective in August.

 Jing-Ping Liao has returned to the South China Institute of Botany, Guangzhou, after conducting an SEM study of the pollen of Zingiberales.

Postdoctoral fellow Linda Prince has left to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, Claremont, California.

Eric Roalson will be concluding his postdoctoral fellowship research in molecular evolution on 19 August, to begin an assistant professor position in the School of Biological Sciences, Washington State University, Pullman.

Amanda Boone, former secretary in Botany, has accepted a position with the Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C.

Guyana Plant Diversity Documented

From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 3 from July 2001.

The plant diversity of a pristine and previously undocumented lowland rainforest of the Guiana Shield in South America has been documented and described by a group of scientists from Botany. H. David Clarke (now with the University of North Carolina at Asheville), Vicki Funk, and Tom Hollowell of the Biological Diversity of the Guianas Program have published “Using Checklists and Collections Data to Investigate Plant Diversity: I: A Comparative Checklist of the Plant Diversity of the Iwokrama Forest, Guyana” in Sida, Botanical Miscellany.

The work presents the results of floristic research conducted as part of the collection of baseline data for this 360,000 hectare area in central Guyana, an area that has been set aside for rainforest conservation and sustainable development. Extensive field work was carried out to make the plant collections that provide the basis for this flora and are detailed along with discussion of ecology and habitats, regional context, and comparison with four other recent floristic works of areas of comparable size on and adjacent to the Guiana Shield in northeastern South America. The combined checklist of 4,659 species indicates that there is considerable floristic heterogeneity among even adjacent sites and will prove useful to botanists, conservation biologists, ecologists, and planners working in northeastern South America. Copies of the publication are available for purchase from the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, 509 Pecan St., Fort Worth, Texas 76102-4060, USA, or visit <http://www.brit.org/sida/sbm/sbm21toc.htm>.

Merrill's Species Blancoanae

From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 3 from July 2001.

Dan Nicolson, whose first child was born in the Philippines while he was doing doctoral research, has always had an interest in the Philippine flora. While Dawn Arculus, formerly in Botany, was working on new types, she noted that some of our specimens of Merrill’s Species Blancoanae had become isoneotypes. Nicolson knew that Blanco had published an early Flora Filipinas in 1837 (two subsequent editions), that no Blanco materials were extant, and that Merrill had recollected and distributed duplicates, which he, long before the term “neotype,” called “illustrative specimens.” Nicolson was unaware that the first set of these “illustrative specimens” was deposited at US, a fact that was discovered from the original correspondence between Merrill and the head curator at that time, William R. Maxon.

The US specimens frequently (about 50 percent of the time) have field information and early text sometimes differing from what Merrill published in 1917 in his “Species Blancoanae” citing his “Species Blancoanae” illustrative specimens as a series running from 1-1064. Nicolson decided to track down the illustrative specimens representing new species established, and to make information available on the Botany Website concerning these specimens, including which ones have field labels. Ultimately Nicolson would like to have these “first stage neotypes” made available on the Web, as an encouragement to workers dealing with these Philippine taxa to chose the US sheets as second stage neotypes. A paper documenting the provenance of the US Species Blancoanae, their original labels and texts, is expected to be published in the August 2001 issue of Taxon. 

Pinnae for Your Thoughts

From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 3 from July 2001.

By Robert DeFilipps

Ferns and their entourage of “allies” have been on the earth for ages. Related by similarities of their structure and life history as spore-bearing vascular cryptogams, the ancestors of today’s ferns, horsetails (Equisetum), club-mosses (Lycopodium), and spike-mosses (Selaginella) once freely cohabited in communities exemplified by now-extinct ferns (such as Psaronius), horsetails (Annularia, Sphenophyllum), and giant club-mosses (Lepidodendron) in the swamp forests of the Carboniferous Age, approximately 300 million years ago. On display in the National Museum of Natural History are fossil impressions of their leaves and stems, preserved in rounded structures known to paleobotanists as “coal balls,” while untold millions of tons of their pressurized remains are burned as coal.

Segments of those plant lineages that evolved and survived through the geological ages, and have come down to us as the living ferns and fern-allies of the New World tropics, are the major research interest of David B. Lellinger, curator of pteridophytes in Botany. Under Lellinger’s meticulous supervision at the U.S. National Herbarium is the largest and most diverse fern collection in the Western Hemisphere, in excess of 250,000 specimens, including six full-size cases of precious type material. His predecessors in a century of continuous fern curation were William R. Maxon who started in 1899, followed by Conrad V. Morton who was employed at the Smithsonian from 1926 to1972. Lellinger, who started as a herbarium aide in 1960, has been a full curator since 1987. Morton and Lellinger were co-authoring South American fern articles as early as 1966.

Lellinger was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1937, and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana (A.B. with Highest Distinction in Botany, 1958) before proceeding to graduate studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (M.S. 1960; Ph.D. 1965). His botanical beginning was inspired by a chance meeting with Albert Fuller (Milwaukee Public Museum), eventually resulting in an undergraduate thesis on the flora of what is now called Tofts Point Natural Area, Wisconsin, after which G. Neville Jones at Urbana pointed Lellinger in the direction of Michigan’s Herb Wagner, who became his major professor.

The structures of ferns require a unique descriptive terminology, the use of which is strongly championed by Lellinger, since the fern “frond,” which unrolls from a “crozier” or “fiddlehead,” is morphogenetically different in its mode of development from marginal meristems, from that of the angiosperm “leaf.” Often delicately compound into divisions known as “pinnae,” “pinnules,” and “pinnulets,” the frond has a “stipe” corresponding to a “petiole,” while spore-cases known as “sori” are formed on the underside or on separate fertile fronds.

The Conservation Column

From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 3 from July 2001.

By Gary Krupnick

The Plant Conservation Unit has recently revised the Web site of the Biological Conservation Newsletter, which is now available at <http://rathbun.si.edu/bcn> (please note the new URL). The revised Web site includes a new searchable “BCN Bibliography,” which consists of over 15,500 references to literature on conservation biology (both plant and animal biology). The citations come from the “Current Literature” section of BCN, dating back from 1983 to the present. These references have been obtained from a weekly review of new journals and books received by the National Museum of Natural History libraries, from a monthly scan of Current Contents, and from suggestions submitted by subscribers to the newsletter.

The bibliography currently includes over 14,200 article titles and 1,300 book titles. The article citations come from nearly 940 different scientific journals, newsletters, bulletins and newspapers. A searchable interface allows visitors to look for a particular article by selecting the title, author, or keyword field and entering a keyword, phrase, or name. Many articles link directly to their corresponding journal’s homepage, where some journals allow non-subscribers to view abstracts and/or articles. New citations can easily be added to the bibliography by contacting the BCN editor at <krupnick.gary@nmnh.si.edu>.

Botany Web Site Update

From Plant Press, Vol. 4, No. 3 from July 2001.

A new Web interface is available for the Index Nominum Genericorum (ING) database. Speed is much improved and new options for searching and reporting are provided. The full ING record will be displayed if fewer than 100 records are found. Otherwise a list will be returned and one or more records can be selected for display of the complete record. The database can now be searched by family, author, or the name/basionym of the type. The help file on the new search form and the introduction on the ING home page give additional search tips and describe the limitations of the ING database.

The new URL for the Web version of ING is <http://rathbun.si.edu/botany/ing/ingForm.cfm>. Your suggestions and corrections are welcome. Contact information is available on the search page.

Two new sections, “Events and Activities” and “References and Tools,” have been added to the Botany Web site <http://www.nmnh.si.edu/departments/botany.html>. We hope this makes it easier to find the content we are providing. Under “Events and Activities” find announcements and archives for meetings and symposia, and special events such as the awarding of the first Cuatrecasas Medal. “References and Tools” highlights information resources we are making available. Some of this material is also listed under “Research” or “Publications” but the new section organizes resources by general topic independently of research projects.

The section on “Useful Web Site References” has been moved from the page on type specimens under “Collections” to a new presentation, “Botanical Links,” listed under “References and Tools.” Many useful Web resources with links are found here. One popular feature is the list of herbaria with Web sites. If you know of one that is not listed, please inform the Webmaster by e-mail <stone.sylvia@nmnh.si.edu>.