The Plant Press

Seaweed Flora of Saba Island

From Plant Press, Vol. 10, No. 3 from July 2007.

Diane and Mark Littler and Barrett Brooks have recently published an online seaweed flora (more than 100 species) of SabaIsland available at <http://sweetgum.nybg.org/saba/algae.html>.

Saba Island in the Caribbean Sea (Photo by Jeff Williams)

 

Users can search for any combination of phylum, family, genus, species, infra-specific rank, author, collector, collector number and precise location as a satellite map with longitude and latitude. Searching for a given parameter generates information associated with the specimens collected by the project under that parameter. Images of photos of living plants in situ from the field are attached at the bottom of the label data.

SabaIsland, southeast of Puerto Rico, is one of the Windward Islands of the Netherlands Antilles. Because there is little room for agriculture on the island’s 5 square miles, the 1,500 islanders rely mainly on income from tourists that come to scuba dive. The Saban fishing community also generates a significant income from fishing nearby Saba Bank.

In response to rising concerns about oil tanker traffic and anchoring, Conservation International, in conjunction with the Netherland Antilles Department of the Environment and Nature, as well as local concerned groups and a total of 12 marine scientists, initiated an investigation of Saba Bank, a massive undersea mountain. Encircled by about 85 square miles of actively growing coral reefs, Saba Bank is the third largest atoll and, until the January 2006 expedition, was one of the least-explored places on the planet. Saba Bank was threatened by the bustling oil trans-shipment depot on nearby St. EustatiusIsland. Supertankers stop there to transfer oil to smaller ships that can enter countries without deep-water ports. Rather than pay minimal mooring fees at St. Eustatius, tankers drop anchor for free just a few miles away at Saba Bank.

The Littler team found Saba Bank to be by far the richest location for seaweed diversity thus far discovered in the Caribbean – a distinction they formerly attributed to Diamond Rock off the coast of Martinique. Many new species of seaweed were discovered around the atoll, including an abundance of several commercially valuable species – precisely what the conservation groups were hoping for. This is particularly significant for a community looking to diversify its economy. The data collected from the 2-week expedition will strengthen the small island community’s petition for international protection as a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area by the International Maritime Organization.

Awards and Grants

From Plant Press, Vol. 10, No. 3 from July 2007.

Pedro Acevedo received a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct an “Assessment of the Adventive and Weedy Flora of the West Indies.”

In April 2007, Vinita Gowda, graduate student of W. John Kress, received a Sigma Xi Grants-in-Aid of Research, for “A Population Genetics Approach to Understand Sex-specific Adaptation in the Caribbean Heliconia-Hummingbird System.”

Alain Touwaide has been appointed as President of the Washington Academy of Sciences.

Staff Retirements

From Plant Press, Vol. 10, No. 3 from July 2007.

Ruth Schallert joined the Smithsonian Institution in 1966.

Ruth Schallert, the first Botany Librarian at the Smithsonian Institution, officially retired in May after 41 years of federal service. A native of western Wisconsin, she received her professional librarian degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Since her first job, in the Art Library of the University of Iowa, Schallert’s career has encompassed three government libraries: the Pacific Salmon Investigations library of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Seattle, Washington; the Naval Oceanographic Office library in Washington, D.C.; and, since 1966, the National Museum of Natural History, largely as Botany Branch librarian, with a brief part-time stint covering the Entomology Branch library. Schallert was previously profiled in the Plant Press (3(1); 2000).

Art by Alice Tangerini: Mortoniodendron uxpanapense Dorr & T. Wendt

From Plant Press Vol. 10, No. 3 from 2007.

Mortoniodendron uxpanapense by Alice Tangerini

Currently 38,000 Latin American type specimens are housed at the U.S. National Herbarium, including this one from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico. Collected from a lowland rain forest in Veracruz, Mexico, the type species was the basis for this drawing of Mortoniodendron uxpanapense (Malvaceae), originally published in Lundellia (7: 44-52; 2004). Known from only one small population, in an area under continual threat of deforestation and burning, the species is Critically Endangered based on IUCN Red List criteria. Tangerini’s drawing was on exhibit in the summer of 2006 at the Athenaeum in Alexandria, Virginia, as part of a group exhibit by the Botanical Art Society of the National Capital Region.

The Library will be a Bit Quieter

From Plant Press, Vol. 10, No. 3 from July 2007.

Gary Krupnick, Editor

With this issue of the Plant Press, we sadly say goodbye to a dear friend of the Department – Botany Branch Librarian Ruth Schallert. Ruth retired in May after 41 years of service at the Smithsonian Institution. Not only was she dearly appreciated by the members of the Department, but she won over many herbarium and library visitors who were grateful for her wonderful assistance in the library.

Ruth was so respected by researchers in the library that a plant species was named for her: the Philippine asclepiad Hoya schallertiae C.M. Burton in 1982. The listing of the species in The Hoyan includes this dedication by Christine Burton: “This hoya ... is named in honor of Mrs. Ruth Schallert, Botany Librarian at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. U.S.A., who has helped me, (and HSI) far beyond the call of duty, in obtaining Hoya research material.” Ruth was unaware that a species had been named for her, and she wrote a thank-you note, twenty years late.

Ruth has received many honors in her career including the prestigious Charles Robert Long Award of Merit, which was presented by the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries (CBHL) to Ruthin June 2000. She was chosen by the CBHL to receive the extraordinary award for a number of reasons, including: in recognition of extraordinary merit; with gratitude for outstanding contributions and service to CBHL; in acknowledgment of professional encouragement to colleagues; and in appreciation for many collaborative activities with scientists, librarians and students in the field of botanical libraries and literature.

The Botany Branch Library is just one link in an extensive Natural History Museum network of departmental libraries. The library and all of its resources serve an important function for research in the Department. Under Ruth’s care, the library has grown to the tune of 60,000 books. Ruth, you will most sincerely be missed.

Mellon Grant Begins to Bear Fruit

From Plant Press, Vol. 10, No. 3 from July 2007.

By Rusty Russell

More than 35 years after the United States National Herbarium designed the first digital plant specimen database, we are continuing to make improvements to this unique resource and a significant contribution to the electronic distribution of museum information. With funding from the Mellon Foundation through a grant to W. John Kress and Rusty Russell, we are participating in a multi-institutional effort to produce digital plant species information for Latin America and consolidate these data in an online presentation under the auspices of Aluka <http://www.aluka.org>, an international non-profit organization dedicated to constructing digital libraries of academic resources.

Dubbed the Latin American Plant Initiative (LAPI), the initial task supported by Mellon is to database and image all type specimens from Latin America. For many of the participating institutions, this project represents their first attempt to identify and organize the type specimens in their custody. For others, it allows them to fully digitize their type holdings. For the U.S. National Herbarium, whose pioneering efforts at digitization began in 1970 and has resulted in the largest, fully verified and completely imaged type specimen collection (supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation), our participation allows Aluka to take advantage of the considerable resources we have amassed over many years. It also permits us to significantly improve upon what is already the most complete type specimen resource in the botanical community.

In the middle of the last century, when the types were segregated from the general herbarium, the decision was made to leave duplicate types (either isotypes or syntypes) in the main collection. This was viewed as both a convenience to researchers and a form of protection by hedging against loss. But ever since the Type Register project began in 1970, this decision has been debated. A few years ago the Collections Advisory Committee recommended that all verified type specimens should be segregated from the general collection. This segregation included all the left-behind specimens, which had been stamped “Additional Material”. The reasoning was that taxonomic studies required the information for all existing types, especially all syntypes for which lectotypification was eventually needed. Our ability to produce and make available the digital versions of these specimens made the convenience argument moot, and supplanted the protection argument. However, because the numbers were expected to be quite large, and the personnel to process them was lacking, there was no concerted effort made to separate them at that time.

BioBlitz Sweeps Rock Creek Park

From Plant Press, Vol. 10, No. 3 from July 2007.

From 18 May at noon until 19 May at noon, several scientists from the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) participated in a BioBlitz at Rock Creek Park in the District of Columbia, to help record plant and animal species there. It was the first of 10 annual BioBlitz events that will occur across the United States until 2016, when the National Parks Service (NPS) will celebrate its 100^th anniversary. Each BioBlitz, a 24-hour inventory of all species in a park, will be organized and co-sponsored by the NPS and the National Geographic Society (NGS).

Festivities for the Rock Creek Park BioBlitz began on 17 May, when members of the Plant Instant Identification System (IIS) project, W. John Kress, Ida Lopez, Ling Zhang, and Michael Butts, demonstrated the Plant Identifier during the International Conservation Caucus Foundation (ICCF) event for the U.S. Congress and their staff at the SamRayburnBuilding on Capitol Hill. The Plant Identifier is a prototype device that allows users to take a digital photo of a leaf that automatically transfers via WiFi or Bluetooth technology to the Identifier notebook computers. Using recognition software, the Identifier then gives the user a choice of leaf images of taxa that are possible matches. Other IIS Project members present were David Jacobs and Sameer Shirdhonkar from the Computer Science Department of the University of Maryland, and Steven Feiner, Sean White and Oren Yeshua from the Computer Science Department of Columbia University.

The following day, some seventy scientists, mostly local, but from as far away as Kansas, were joined by hundreds of volunteers to discuss biodiversity and lead school groups and the public on trips to observe nature and collect specimens in Rock Creek Park. The IIS team demonstrated the Plant Identifier, and Vinita Gowda and Norm Bourg led groups that identified and recorded the botanical specimens found in RockCreekPark.

At the end of the 24-hour BioBlitz, 30 aquatic plants, 232 terrestrial plants, 17 amphibians and reptiles, 21 aquatic invertebrates, 29 birds, 20 fish, 52 fungi, 12 mammals, 10 soil invertebrates and 243 terrestrial insects were inventoried. The total of 666 species is bound to increase after lab analysis is finished by researchers.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 10, No. 3 from July 2007.

For over 27 years, outstanding college-students from around the world have been specially selected to pursue scientific research at NMNH in the ten-week summer Research Training Program (RTP). Fourteen students were chosen from a field of 130 applicants to participate in RTP 2007, and seventeen NMNH research scientists agreed to serve as their research advisers. Hailing from five countries: Colombia, Brazil, Indonesia, Canada, and the United States, and pursuing a variety of research projects ranging from investigating the oxidation of the Earth’s mantle to studying the gland morphology of foam-nesting frogs to examining the co-evolution of Heliconia and hummingbirds to deriving Native American trade routes by analyzing iron meteoritic Hopewell beads, this elite group of students has welcomed inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural exchange. Three of the 14 students are pursuing research projects in the Department of Botany.