From Plant Press, Vol. 13, No. 1 from January 2010.
By Gary A. Krupnick
Education plays a strong role in the Department of Botany. The Department’s mission and vision statement includes the aspiration “to become an international center for the training of a new generation of botanical systematists, professional botanists and paraprofessionals.” The resources available within the museum, including staff, herbarium specimens, living greenhouse specimens, and a molecular lab, make the Department an attractive place for students to further their training as young botanists.
There are several ways that students can gain botanical experience in the Department. Volunteering is one way. Volunteers contribute their time to the benefit of the Institution. While the service can be educational and of benefit to the volunteer, the activities are determined solely by the sponsoring staff with the aim of contributing to the needs of the Museum. A volunteer position is considered community service, not an academic appointment, and is not recorded as such on the volunteers resume or CV. The Visitor Information and Associates' Reception Center (VIARC) manages and administers all behind-the-scenes volunteer appointments Smithsonian-wide.
Internships are another way the Department actively engages students, providing hands-on education and training in research, collections management and even administration. Unlike volunteering, an internship is an academic appointment—a prearranged learning experience with both the intern and Institution benefiting from the endeavor. Internships have an element of educational training build into the appointment and this training complements the education and career goals of the intern. Internships at NMNH are administered centrally and officially recorded with the Smithsonian through the Center for Education and Museum Studies (SCEMS).
The Smithsonian is not a degree granting institution and therefore does not award academic credit. Interns can, however, receive academic credit from their university or college for their internships and many U.S. colleges and universities will recognize academic work performed while interning at the museum.
Internship appointments are generally at least six weeks in duration, although special week-long opportunities during Winter Break and Spring Break are often available. Students must be at least 16 years old to participate in an internship. The majority of students who serve an internship in the Department are from undergraduate colleges and universities, but high school students and graduate students have been appointed as interns as well.
Dating way back to the days when Botany was housed in the SI Castle and internships were an informal and unrecorded appointment, the Department has maintained a long tradition of educating students through internships. Many current and even retired Botany staff started as an intern in the Department. Over the past 30 years, the National Museum of Natural History has hosted more than 3,000 interns including many in Botany. The number of students serving an internship at the Museum has increased over time and grown exponentially over the past few years; sometimes even doubling from the previous year. In 2009 alone the Museum hosted 372 internships with 46 of these in Botany.
Interns have recently been involved in a broad range of projects: inventorying herbarium specimens, creating digital images of specimens, describing new species, managing databases of rare and endangered species, cataloguing historic collection maps, conducting laboratory research, and conducting field work in both terrestrial and marine locales.
One program that hosted several interns this past year was the Plant Conservation Unit (PCU). Headed by Gary Krupnick, PCU is currently involved in the preliminary conservation assessments of plant species. The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) calls for a preliminary assessment list of the conservation status of all known plant species by 2010. Unfortunately, only 4 percent of the world’s flora has been assessed. A model developed by Krupnick, with W. John Kress and Warren Wagner, uses data from herbarium specimens to speed up the global assessment, identifying which plant species may be threatened and which species are common based upon the number, timing, and spacing of specimen collections. With the assistance of student interns, the plant specimen database of several plant families from the U.S. National Herbarium has been checked for accuracy. Using floras and checklists, interns have been assisting in identifying synonymy problems and resolving gaps in specimen data records, such as identifying missing geographic data at the state, province, and island level.
Further, of the approximately 5 million specimens in the collection at the U.S. National Herbarium, roughly 1 million specimens (20%) have been inventoried. Interns are helping to build the database by inventorying specimens from targeted plant families (e.g., Fabaceae and Poaceae) and geographic regions (e.g., the West Indies) for conservation assessments.
The Collections Management, headed by Rusty Russell, hosted the most interns this past year, focusing on projects ranging from the plant image collection to organizing the historic map collection. The Plant Image Collection project is a continuation of the longstanding work to build and make available tens of thousands of plant images on the Botany website. In 2010, in addition to adding images from Mary Stensvold (U.S. Forest Service), the West Virginia University herbarium, and other donated collections, Russell and his interns plan to conserve the Soderstrom slide collection, archive backup images, and upload selected images to both the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) and Smithsonian Flickr sites.
Another project focuses on the botany of the United States Exploring Expedition: 1838-1842. In the U.S. National Herbarium there are potentially 10,000 U.S. Exploring Expedition specimens from around the world. It is estimated that a total of 50,000 botanical specimens exist at a variety of herbaria across the country and around the globe. A comprehensive narrative discussing the Botany of the U.S. Exploring Expedition has not yet been done. This project focuses on the botanical story of the expedition from its historical and scientific perspectives. The project’s goals include enumerating the entire collection, conserving each specimen, and producing a web presentation that integrates specimens and historical documents, such as publications, correspondence, manuscripts, field notes, and journal entries, into a precise resource on the Botany of the U.S. Exploring Expedition. Interns have been working in the herbarium to extract specimens collected on the U.S. Exploring Expedition as well as conduct research online, and in libraries and archives to resolve gaps in the specimen data record. Interns have also been managing the growing Wilkes collection and transcribing historical documents.
Russell also leads a study to examine the floristic changes in the Santa Rosa/San Jacinto National Monument. The Department of Botany has a cooperative project between the U.S. National Herbarium, the Riverside Municipal Museum, the University of Redlands and the University of California-Riverside mapping changes in the flora of the Santa Rosa/San Jacinto National Monument area in Riverside County using thousands of historic specimen records and modern botanical collections. Interns have been assembling herbarium specimens from this locality and collecting data in electronic form. Digital images have been created. Most importantly, interns have been translating the general locality information in geo-reference points in order for it to be interpretable by GIS. Information obtained from this project will contribute to improved public education as well as decisions that are being made the Bureau of Land Management regarding designation of certain land in the area of the National Monument.
Beyond herbarium work, the Department has hosted interns in a laboratory setting and in the field. Liz Zimmer has had interns isolate plant DNAs from various forms of tissue samples, check the amount and integrity of the DNAs and amplify and sequence DNAs with specific barcoding gene primers. Bob Faden hosted interns who learned about plant anatomy and microtechnique using living plants grown in the Botany Department Research Greenhouse. The techniques used include paraffin-embedded sections, whole leaf clearings, epidermal scrapes, and scanning electron microscopy. Other researchers in Botany, such as Pedro Acevedo, Laurence Dorr, Vicki Funk, John Kress, Mark Littler, James Norris, Paul Peterson, Harold Robinson, Laurence Skog, and Warren Wagner have hosted interns in an organized 10-week hypothesis-driven, in-residence summer research and study curriculum for undergraduate students.
For the ultimate botanical experience, student interns have participated in field research. Over the past six years, through funding from Smith College, Kress and his graduate student Vinita Gowda have mentored interns in the Eastern Caribbean islands, where they have an on-going investigation on the relationship between the genus Heliconia and their hummingbird pollinators. The students learned how to set up an ecological study, record observations, dissect flowers, and collect and analyze nectar. Mark and Diane Littler have mentored interns in the Bahamas, where they taught methods of SCUBA-based field collecting and pressing techniques for various algal species, plus molecular, preservation and identification techniques.
Many interns have presented their Smithsonian internship research at scientific meetings and conferences. For instance, Laura Lagomarsino, an undergraduate student from the University of California – Berkeley, now in the graduate program at Harvard University, presented an oral paper, “Phylogeny and Floral Evolution of Heliconia section Heliconia,” at the joint Botany and Mycology 2009 Societies meetings held in Snowbird, Utah, this past July. Like Lagomarsino, many interns have gone on to graduate school to further their education in botany. Several interns who have completed their doctorates are now Research Associates in the department and are active collaborators with Botany staff, such as Chris Hardy who interned with Faden in 1994 and 1995.
Below is a partial list of the 2009 interns hosted by the Department of Botany (listed by supervisor and project).
W. John Kress
Evolutionary history of Heliconia
- Laura Lagomarsino, University of California, Berkeley
Isolation and barcoding plant DNA samples
- Tarja de Soysa, Smith College
- Nandita Fernandes, St. George’s University
- Silvia Nicole, University of Padona
- Ci Xiuqin, Chinese Academy of Science
- Zhang Yongjians, China Agricultural University
- Zhuo Zhang, University of Michigan
Molecular phylogeny of the Strelitziaceae
- Cary Pirone, Florida International University
Gary Krupnick
Conservation assessment of plant species
- Marie Balboa, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
- Kelsey Brooks, Princeton University
- Hannah Brown, Averett University
- Emily Forse, Georgetown University
- Dana Gadeken, University of Mary Washington
- Joo Hyun Lee, George Washington University
- Grace Liu, University of West Georgia
- Melissa Marshall, Smith College
- Eleanor Moran, University of Virginia
- Mayda Nathan, Dartmouth College
- Siddharth Rajagopalan, University of Virginia
- Ashley Sullivan, American University
- Linda Yi, Towson University
Mark Littler
Collecting expedition in Bahamas
- Kristal Ambrose, Caribbean Marine Research Center
- Caitlin O'Brian, Caribbean Marine Research Center
- Jean Pearson, Caribbean Marine Research Center
Rusty Russell
Arizona flora
- Sarah Molinari, College of William and Mary
- Alice Zicht, Oberlin College
Biological field books
- Claire Grunes, Winston Churchill High School
Botany of the United States Exploring Expedition: 1838-1842
- Lorah Patterson, Western Michigan University
- Caroline Young, Kenyon College
Catalogue of Botany maps
- Sarah Beaver, Appalachian State University
- Jarrod Fredericks, Florida State University
- Kaylin Gaal, College of Wooster
- Eamonn Hayes, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
- Jasper Holleman, Christelyk Lyceum Zeist High School
- Kyle Lincoln, Kalamazoo College
- Paige Looney, University of Georgia
- Amanda Manahan, Heidelberg University
- Hitesh Pant, American University
- Alex Peimer, State University of New York, New Paltz
- James Shoemaker, Kalamazoo College
- Chutimon Sindhuprama, University of Michigan
- Amanda Swango, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Filing plant specimens
- Eric Caine, Phillips Exeter Academy High School
- Michael Ely, Winston Churchill High School
Floristic changes in the Santa Rosa/San Jacinto National Monument
- Steven Chong, San Jose State University
- Julie Szymakzek, American University
Linguistic analysis of ethnobotanical data from herbarium collections
- Aaron Freeman, University of Maryland, College Park
Plant Image Collection
- Genna Fleming, University of Maryland
Liz Zimmer
Isolation and barcoding plant DNA samples
- Reilley Keane, The Potomac High School
- Elizabeth Lyons, George Washington University
- Lara Mittereder, George Mason University
- Shannon Peters, Michigan State University
- Angela Turner, Virginia Tech
- Radhika Wikramanayake, George Washington University
Educational experiences offered to the interns can often go beyond the assigned tasks and duties. The Museum also provides a suite of behind-the-scenes tours, lunch discussions and even special lectures for interns to participate in. In addition, students can explore the sights of DC and join special activities arranged just for students participating in Smithsonian academic appointments. This past summer, a Smithsonian-wide Museum Careers Seminar Series featured topics such as career planning, choosing a graduate school, and filling out a government job application.
Registered interns have also enjoyed other benefits. They have received discounts at the Smithsonian's gift shops and one free IMAX ticket each week. They have also received discounts at the National Gallery gift shops and eateries and in the winter discounts on skating and equipment rental at the National Gallery Sculpture Garden Ice Skating Rink, located next to Natural History.
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