The Plant Press

Associating with Botany

From Plant Press, Vol. 12, no. 3 from 2009.

Editor's Note
By Gary Krupnick, Editor

In this issue of the Plant Press, we begin a new series which profiles our Research Associates. There are currently 455 scientists holding a professional academic appointment at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. There are three different appointment types including Research Collaborator (162), Research Associate (251) and Adjunct Scientist (42). The term “Research Associate” is sometimes used collectively for all individuals awarded a professional academic appointment and who are part of the NMNH scientific community. Although active members of the scientific community, Research Associates are not employees of the Museum, but individuals who hold a formal scholarly affiliation with the Institution. The Department of Botany is currently hosting 41 academic appointments.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 12, No. 3 from July 2009.

German Muttoni (left) and J. Mauricio Bonifacino

From March through April 2009, German Muttoni worked as a volunteer in the Botany Department with Vicki Funk’s research group. He began by helping Mauricio Bonifacino on the data review and entry for the “Virtual key to the Compositae species of the USA” effort, a project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  When Bonifacino returned to Uruguay, Muttoni switched to organizing mounted specimens of Compositae sent from the herbarium at the National Botanical Research Institute, Windhoek, Namibia. This large gift of mounted specimens is now in order by tribe and genus and is ready to file. He also worked with Sara Alexander to update the online information on herbarium specimens collected from the Guiana Shield of South America. Muttoni reports that he enjoyed being a part of the Smithsonian Institution because he thinks “...the increase and diffusion of knowledge...” is a great mission. Funk says that Muttoni did about 300 hours of volunteer work and made a big contribution to all three projects. He has returned to his home in Montevideo, Uruguay, but will be back in the U.S. soon to start graduate school at the University of Wisconsin.

Awards and Grants

From Plant Press, Vol. 12, No. 3 from July 2009. 

Pedro Acevedo-Rodríguez was honored by having a new species named after him, Psitticanthus acevedoi Kuijt (Syst. Bot. Monographs 86: 1-361; 2009). With only two known collections, both by Acevedo, Job Kuijt named this species to recognize Acevedo as a collector. This species of Loranthaceae is only known from Amazonas, Brazil.

            In the same monograph, the late John J. Wurdack (1921 – 1998) was honored with the species Psittacanthus wurdackii (Rizzini) Kuijt. Previously recognized as a variety, this species from northern Venezuela is elevated to species rank, and recognizes Wurdack as the senior collector of the type species.

Emanuela Appetiti has been appointed to the Scientific Committee of the forthcoming international meeting “Darwin, Darwinisms and Evolution (1859-2009),” to be held at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, on 22-23 September 2009.

In celebration of the 10^th anniversary of the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries (CBHL) Annual Literature Award, a Special Recognition Award was presented to TL-2, more formally known as Taxonomic Literature: a Selective Guide to Botanical Publications and Collections with Dates, Commentaries and Types, 2^nd edition. This monumental work is one of the most important resources in taxonomic literature. Originally created by Frans Antonie Stafleu and Richard S. Cowan, this resource was continued by Erik A. Mennega, and then most recently by Laurence J. Dorr and Dan H. Nicolson and honored by CBHL for significant contributions to the literature of botany and the study of plants. The judges described the series as “an indispensable and essential resource in supporting the research of systematic botanists.” The award was announced at the CBHL annual meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, on May 12-16.

Robin Everly

At the 41^st annual meeting of CBHL Robin Everly was elected to its Board of Directors. In a four year term, Everly will serve as Board President in the third year. Currently, her position is as second Vice-President. One of her goals is to increase CBHL’s visibility among the library community and botanical gardens. She would also like to see the organization’s members do more outreach within the botanical and horticultural communities.

Paul Peterson and Jun Wen each received a $5,000 grant from the National Museum of Natural History’s Office of the Associate Director for Research and Collections. Proposals for the competitive Small Grants process for 2009 were rated and ranked by an internal committee of scientific staff members. Peterson’s project is titled “A molecular phylogeny of the grass subfamily Chloridoideae, tribe Cynodonteae and subtribe Muhlenbergiinae,” and Wen’s is “Biogeographic diversification of the ginseng plant family in the Indonesian archipelago - testing the Wallace’s Line.” 

Specimens Aid in Conservation Assesment of Endangered Plant Species

From Plant Press Vol. 12, no. 3 from 2009.

Argyroxiphium sandwicense collected 1838-1842 by Charles Wilkes from Mouna Kea, Hawaii

Many plant species are in danger of extinction because they are threatened by the loss, degradation and fragmentation of natural habitat, by competition with invasive species, by over-exploitation and pollution, and by global climate change. Of the estimated 380,000 plant species that inhabit the planet, it is not known, however, how many are threatened with extinction. To date only 3.2% of the world’s flora is fully assessed for their conservation status and listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Unfortunately time is running out to assess the remaining species as pristine habitats, such as old-growth forests are lost to degradation and destruction around the world. With limited funds and capacity, it will not be possible to complete an assessment of every known plant species before additional species are lost, and certainly not before 2010 as called for by the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation.

Focus on Research Associates: The Passion of Christian Feuillet

From Plant Press, Vol. 12, No. 3 from July 2009.

By Vicki A. Funk

Christian Feuillet has been a Research Collaborator and Associate in the U.S. National Herbarium and Department of Botany for over 20 years. How did this French tropical botanist wind up in Washington D.C., spending hours on curating the herbarium and participating in research projects around the world? Well, it is an interesting story.

Passiflora kawensis Feuillet from Montagnes de Kaw, French Guiana. (Photo by Christian Feuillet)

He was born in Normandy, France, in the town of Rouen in 1948 and from his earliest memories his family always had a garden around their home, sometimes up to an acre. Every weekend he would garden with his father while his brother played with cars or built a radio receiver. He believes that is when he was infected with “a virus for nature;” he even kept plants in his bedroom. When he was 14, during a family vacation on the French Riviera, he saw his first Passiflora caerulea, and obtained a cutting from the owner. It grew happily on his windowsill for years until he took it to the university (it did not survive the journey).

While at college and university he followed a winding path that lead through pharmacy and biology in Rouen in Normandy and biology and animal physiology in Montpellier in the south. This was followed by obligatory military service and then back to zoology in Paris. In 1975, he visited French Guiana where the forest felt like home. Then, still back in Paris, he studied plant physiology, oceanography, and tropical botany, and in July 1981 in Paris was awarded a Ph.D. in Tropical Botany with a memoir on the plant architecture in the family Gesneriaceae.

Christian Feuillet on one of his many collecting trips.

Feuillet started his scientific career in November 1981 with the Office de Recherche Scientifique et Technique Outre-mer (Orstom), now Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), in Paris for six months and Cayenne (French Guiana) for six years. He would have stayed happily in the neotropics but fate had other plans. In 1986 Amy Rossman (mycologist) participated in a field trip in French Guiana that was sponsored by the Orstom and the Biological Diversity of the Guianas Program (Smithsonian Institution). Feuillet and Rossman were married and he came to the Smithsonian in August 1988. During his career he has published almost 100 mostly systematic and floristic papers and described or combined ~100 taxa.

Type Register Reaches 100,000 Records

From Plant Press, Vol. 12, No. 3 from July 2009.

By John Boggan, Rusty Russell and Warren L. Wagner

Vinita Gowda has been sorting and filing types for the past two years. (Photo by Gary Krupnick)

The Type Specimen Register of the United States National Herbarium reached a notable milestone on June 17, 2009, with the addition of the 100,000^th type specimen record. Schäfer 5462 was collected in 1975 on Tahuata Island in the Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia and is the holotype of Psychotria oliveri Lorence & W.L. Wagner (Rubiaceae), published in Allertonia 9: 21 (2005). The specimen is apropos for a number of reasons: the species was co-authored by one of our own curators, Warren L. Wagner, and its name honors deceased staff member Royce Oliver. The specimen highlights our Pacific Islands collections, one of our herbarium’s geographic strengths and an area of longtime and ongoing research by Smithsonian botanists. The species will be included in the Flora of the Marquesas Islands, co-authored by Wagner.

Smithsonian botanist Royce Oliver (1929–1997) collected in the Marquesas Islands in 1975 with Peter A. Schäfer and Marie-Helène Sachet and collaborated with Sachet and F. Raymond Fosberg on Marquesan plant studies and many other Pacific projects. Oliver worked at Washington University and Missouri Botanical Garden from 1964 until 1979 when he took a position in the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Botany to work with Fosberg and Sachet, where he stayed until his retirement in 1992.

The Marquesas Flora Project was originally a Smithsonian project organized by Sachet, Fosberg and Oliver, but in 1988 was re-organized as a collaboration with the National Tropical Botanical Garden. It is being completed first as an online flora and then as a two volume publication. The flora and more information about the project are available at http://botany.si.edu/pacificislandbiodiversity/marquesasflora/index.htm.

Type specimens are of immense importance to systematists because they are the specimens upon which an author bases his or her description of a newly named taxon, and thus provide for all later researchers a direct link between that taxon as it exists in nature and its scientific name and description. Examination of type specimens is necessary to determine what natural populations to apply a particular name to, and whether a name is properly applied in the first place. Type specimens can show whether two different names have been applied to the same taxon, or whether a taxon is distinct from all known taxa and still undescribed. Particularly with many older names that have brief and frequently inadequate descriptions, examination of type specimens is often the only means to make such determinations with any certainty.