The Plant Press

Art by Alice Tangerini: Oenothera deserticola

From Plant Press, Vol. 8, No. 3 from July 2005.

The Department’s Web site has several new presentations, including one devoted to Onagraceae, the evening primrose family (see page 5). Pictured here is Oenothera deserticola, a drawing featured in Warren Wagner’s treatment of Mexican species in Oenothera sect. Hartmannia (Novon 14: 124–133. 2004). Oenothera deserticola is characterized by decumbent stems, morning-opening flowers, rose purple petals, and angled, but unwinged capsules with an attenuate apex. The species is from the transvolcanic region of Mexico.

A Museum of Science

From Plant Press, Vol. 8, No. 3 from July 2005.

The recent debates within the school boards in Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Ohio are witness to the fact that many Americans are struggling to understand the boundaries and compatibilities between scientific reason and religious belief. The former is based on the principle of using facts and evidence to test hypotheses about nature while the latter relies on personal faith to understand our place in our communities and the world. Scientific evidence and religious faith have existed side-by-side for centuries and both are important in today’s society. When the distinction between the two becomes blurred, however, society and humankind are not well served.

Since 1846 the Smithsonian Institution has been committed to the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.” Each of the museums of the Smithsonian has its own specific mission to achieve this goal. The vision of the National Museum of Natural History is to increase scientific knowledge and improve society’s scientific literacy by inspiring the public to understand how scientists learn about the world and how science affects people’s lives. Over 300 scientists and associated staff currently working in the Museum have dedicated their careers to advancing scientific knowledge.

Natural History Research Proves Integral for Plant Conservation

From Plant Press, Vol. 8, No. 3 from July 2005.

Effective conservation of biodiversity is dependent upon a firm understanding of the basic biological attributes of species. The immense data on plants and animals contained in the collections of the world’s natural history museums, herbaria, and botanical gardens have always been critical for conservation purposes, but only recently have museum scientists become active in assessing and developing environmental management programs. In a recently published book, Plant Conservation: A Natural History Approach edited by Gary A. Krupnick and W. John Kress (University of Chicago Press), scientists from the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution along with their collaborators have presented a convincing portrait of the importance of museum research for effective conservation assessment and management.

Plant Conservation explores the value of botanical collections and museum science in contemporary biodiversity conservation studies. Plant conservation is explored from a natural history perspective through the actions, observations, and investigations of botanists in the field, herbaria, and laboratory. No less than 27 scientists from the Smithsonian Institution (24 from the Botany Department) participated in writing the book. They were joined by 21 collaborators representing research institutions in the USA, Brazil, England, Germany, Scotland, and Venezuela.

Plant Conservation is launched with a provocative foreword by Dan Janzen and then proceeds with a broad view of plant biodiversity, a consideration of evolutionary and taxonomic consequences of habitat alteration, a review of specific threats to plant diversity (such as invasive species and global climate change), a discussion of the consequences of plant population decline at the ecological, evolutionary, and taxonomic levels, an assessment of techniques for mapping centers of botanical diversity, and, finally, an overview of management strategies that protect plant biodiversity from further decline.

In this book, plants are considered in their broadest sense, including marine algae, unicellular dinoflagellates, lichens, mosses, and flowering plants while a multitude of habitats from all corners of the globe are covered from species-rich tropical rain forests to underwater kelp forests.

Plant Conservation emphasizes the role museums and botanical gardens with their rich holdings of scientific collections and unique perspective on the diversity of life will ultimately play in the future of biodiversity conservation.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 8, No. 3 from July 2005.

Sara Garvey is an intern working with Robert Faden on Commelinaceae research from 2 June to 29 July. Garvey is going into her senior year at NuclaHigh School in Nucla, Colorado. She is being sponsored by the Pinhead Institute, Telluride, Colorado.

Adrienne Fritsch and Katherine Thompson are interns working with W. John Kress. Fritsch will be creating an electronic library of reprints and assisting in the creation of the Zingiberales Web site. She is from Washington D.C. Thompson, a third-year student at Smith College, Massachusetts, traveled to the West Indies to assist in the observation of hummingbird pollinators of two endemic Heliconia species. She will also assist in herbarium research.

The Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield Program welcomes three summer interns. Undergraduate students, Andrea Barnes (Brown University), Stephanie Stuber (College of Environmental Science and Forestry, SUNY), and Katie Younts (Oberlin College) will be databasing US National Herbarium data for the Venezuelan Guayana (Amazonas, Bolívar, Delta Amacuro) in addition to other research duties of the Program under the supervision of Vicki Funk.

Slides Go Digital

From Plant Press, Vol. 8, No. 3 from July 2005.

By Heijia L. Wheeler

Volunteer Fran Pitlick (Photo by Deborah Bell)

When faced with a complex and seemingly monumental task, one reaction is to simply walk away. Then there are a few very special people who jump right in and, with creative energy and patience, tackle that mountain. Fran Pitlick is one of those special people. She is a retired biochemist and cell biologist who spent ten years as a bench scientist at YaleUniversity, and another ten years at the National Institutes of Health, before taking on several executive administrative jobs for another twelve years. She began her volunteer tenure with Rusty Russell in the Department about three years ago.

A long standing project in the Department has been to convert the vast collection of photographic slides to digital images and create a user-friendly database for searching and finding a particular image with descriptive information about each slide. The Department has tens of thousands of slides which will be converted to the digital format. There are inherent problems with storing photographic slides. They are bulky, take up large amounts of storage space and are hard to access. They also deteriorate and fade over time. Digitizing them not only preserves the images, they can often be “repaired” by color enhancement and other restoration techniques. More than 18,000 photographic slides have been scanned and there are thousands more yet to be digitized. Pitlick started her volunteer activities working on the bamboo slide collection left behind by Tom Soderstrom. More recently, she has worked with Russell to standardize and compile the databases.

Many other volunteers have had a part in scanning these slides for the database. Lizzie McGee, another volunteer, spent eight hours, every Tuesday for over a year going through the slide collection and scanning them into the database. McGee is a graphic designer and has moved on to start her own business. Alexandra Wright took over where McGee left off and the work continues. Wright is a Latin scholar with degrees from the University of Durham and OxfordUniversity in England. She has also attended HarvardUniversity on this side of the pond. Over all that time, Pitlick has overseen the project and trained the other volunteers. She is the constant on this project. As volunteers leave for various reasons and others come to take their place, Pitlick helps train them and makes sure there is consistency and accuracy. In the past year, Pitlick, Russell and Ellen Farr created an interactive Web site with more than 18,000 images, scanned by several volunteers. The database and images can be accessed at the Plant Image Collection Web site <http://persoon.si.edu/PlantImages/>, which provides information to not only satisfy the curiosity of lay botanists, but also provides vital information to research botanists all over the world.

Rzedowskis Receives Fifth Cuatrecasas Medal

FromPlant Press, Vol. 8, No. 3 from July 2005.

Graciela Calderon de Rzedowski and Jerzy Rzedowski, joint recipients of the Jose Cuatrecasas medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany.

Drs. Jerzy Rzedowski and Graciela Calderón de Rzedowski of the Instituto de Ecología del Bajío in Michoacán, Mexico are the joint recipients of the 2005 José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany presented at the 5^th Annual Smithsonian Botanical Symposium. The medal is in honor of José Cuatrecasas, a pioneering botanist and taxonomist who spent nearly a half-century working in Botany at the Smithsonian Institution. Cuatrecasas’ research, especially in the flowering plant family Asteraceae, was devoted to the classification, biogeography, exploration, and ecology of plants of the paramo and subparamo regions of Andean South America. Out of enduring respect and admiration, the José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany was established. This medal is presented annually to a botanist and scholar of international stature who has contributed significantly to advancing the field of tropical botany. The award serves to keep vibrant the accomplishments and memory of this outstanding scientist.

The recipient of the Cuatrecasas Medal is selected by a committee made up of botanists on the staff at the National Museum of Natural History, in consultation with other local plant scientists in the Washington area. This year the Committee was composed of Laurence Dorr (Chair), Pedro Acevedo, Alan Whittemore, and Pat Herendeen. Nominations for the Medal are accepted from all scientists in Botany at the Museum. The award consists of a bronze medal bearing an image of José Cuatrecasas on the front with the recipient’s name and date of presentation on the back.

Abstracts from the Speakers of the Smithsonian Botanical Symposium

From Plant Press, Vol. 8, No. 3 from July 2005.

The fifth annual Smithsonian Botanical Symposium was held 15-16 April 2005. The symposium, “The Future of Floras: New Frameworks, New Technologies, New Uses,” addressed how new technologies will further the inventory and classification of life. Below are the speakers’ abstracts from the papers that were presented.

Speakers of the 2005 Smithsonian Botanical Symposium (from left): P. Bryan Heidorn, Scott Miller, David Jacobs, Vicki A. Funk, David F. Farr, Robert A. Morris, Vincent Savolainen, W. John Kress (Photo by Elaine Haug).

 

DNA Barcoding can be Applied to Plants

From Plant Press, Vol. 8, No. 3 from July 2005.

DNA barcodes, short DNA sequences for species-level identification, have now been successfully applied to flowering plants. In a paper entitled “Use of DNA barcodes to identify flowering plants,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, W. John Kress and colleagues Ken Wurdack, Elizabeth Zimmer, Lee Weigt, and Daniel Janzen describe their methods for identifying two DNA barcodes that can now be applied as a practical and standardized tool for species identification in biodiversity assessment, life history and ecological studies, and forensic analysis of plants. The cytochrome c oxidase (CO1) sequence, which has been found to be widely applicable in animal barcoding, is not appropriate for most species of plants due to a much slower rate of COI gene evolution in higher plants than in animals. The two regions identified by Kress and colleagues are the nuclear Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) and the plastid trnH-psbA intergenic spacer. Herbarium collections, such as the 4.7 million specimens maintained in the U.S. National Herbarium, provide a documented source for building the plant barcode library. In this study, plant specimens over 100 years old were tested and shown to be usable for DNA barcodes.

Botanists Look Into the Future

From Plant Press, Vol. 8, No. 3 from July 2005.

By Gary A. Krupnick

Imagine trekking into an unexplored tropical forest, equipped with a palm-top computer, wearable imaging goggles, a global positioning system receiver, and a web-based satellite communication device. After coming across an unidentifiable plant, you take a picture of a leaf, and your portable computer compares it to an electronic database of leaf images from the world’s tropical plant species. You then immediately compare your newly collected plant with the type specimen and reference collections archived and digitized in museums thousands of miles away. You also place a small leaf sample in your hand-held DNA barcoder to read the genotype of the species. The information you gather is sent with the speed of the Internet to your colleagues back in the lab where the genetic composition and phylogenetic position of each new species is rapidly determined. 

Science or science fiction? On 15-16 April, a group of 160 enthusiastic scientists gathered at the National Museum of Natural History, to discuss these technological possibilities at the fifth annual Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, “The Future of Floras: New Frameworks, New Technologies, New Uses.” Seven invited speakers explored the past, present, and future uses of floras and checklists; development of on-line keys; innovations in digital image recognition; production of electronic field guides; and the prospects of plant DNA barcoding. Keynote speaker Rita Colwell addressed how the application of biodiversity knowledge can benefit humankind in innovative and practical ways.

Plant imaging technology, which will compare leaf samples to herbarium specimens, was discussed at the Symposium. (Photo by David Jacobs)

The symposium got off to an exciting start on the evening of 15 April, with an opening reception at the United States Botanic Garden, a symposium co-sponsor. An enthusiastic crowd gathered in the atrium for food and conversation surrounded by a fragrant and flourishing collection of plants. During the reception, guests were able to view the latest Garden exhibit featuring plant species that were collected during the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-1842).

W. John Kress, symposium convener, welcomed the audience at the morning session on 16 April. Kress explained that the theme of the symposium grew out of a project of the Department. Type specimens at many herbaria, including New York, Missouri, Harvard, and the US, have been recently digitized, making them available to botanists around the world. What if these digitized specimens can be used in conjunction with imaging software to create an electronic field guide? Ideas around this question and others helped create the theme of the symposium.

Awards and Grants

From Plant Press, Vol. 8, No. 3 from July 2005.

Vicki Funk was elected President of the American Society of Plant Taxonomy (ASPT). She will take over as President elect in September 2005 and as President in September 2006. The annual ASPT meeting will take place in Austin, Texas, on 13-17 August.

Dan Nicolson received the 2004 NMNH Science Achievement Award for “The Forsters and the Botany of the Second Cook Expedition (1772-1775)” [with F. R. Fosberg (deceased)]; Regnum Vegetabile 139: 1-759.  2004. The monograph reviews the Forsters’ botanical collections from the second expedition by James Cook (1772-1775) in search of the mythic Terra Australis Incognita.