From Plant Press Vol. 17 no. 1, January 2014
By Vicki Funk
In 2013 the National Museum of Natural History’s Collections Program initiated a new initiative that provides funding for graduate students. The goal is to provide financial support to graduate students while at the same time achieving collections management goals, particularly the generation of new collections catalog (EMu) records. Funding is competitive. Proposals must be initiated by NMNH staff members who are advisors or co-advisors to the student that would benefit from the funding. Funding is not available to continue the student’s or advisor’s work; rather, these awards are to work on high priority collections condition or information projects that meet the museum’s needs while providing training and experience in curatorial techniques.
For the 2013-2014 academic year, Aleks Radosavljevic is working with Vicki Funk to sort and digitize a large backlog of the unprocessed material left behind by José Cuatrecasas. At the time of his passing in 1996, the prolific Cuatrecasas had nearly 60 herbarium cases of partially processed plant material that he had (at one point or another in his long career) been actively working on. While the Department of Botany has made great progress in processing this material over the nearly two decades since his death, there are still over 7,000 specimens that need to be sorted, mounted and cataloged. These collections span the career of Cuatrecasas and, while they are primarily from the Andean regions of Colombia and Venezuela, they include a great diversity of plant families.
Additionally there are over 150 unmounted isotypes in the Cuatrecasas collection that are not represented in the U.S. National Herbarium’s Type Collection. Unfortunately, many of the specimens are highly contaminated with mercuric chloride, a widely used biocide and specimen preservative prior to the mid-20th century that readily sublimates at room temperature. With the help of the resourceful Linda Hollenberg and Debbie Bell, this should create only a minor delay and Radosavljevic should be able to complete the project with very little danger. The completion of this project will result in the creation of thousands of new and important digital records of Cuatrecasas’ work that will complement the already impressive informal archive housed in the Department of Botany.
Radosavljevic received his undergraduate degree from Marymount University and his Master’s degree from City College of New York, where he worked with Robert Anderson on ecological niche modeling methodology. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the joint Program in Plant Biology and Conservation at Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanic Garden, where he is advised by Patrick Herendeen.
Radosavljevic’s dissertation research focuses on the systematics, biogeography and taxonomy of a large pantropical legume genus, Cynometra. Heis broadly interested in the evolution and biogeography of legumes and the synthesis of ecological niche modeling and phylogenetics to ask evolutionary questions. Radosavljevic has conducted field work in Guyana, and will be travelling to Mexico and Brazil in 2014 to conduct field work in support of his dissertation. Fittingly, Radosavljevic’s first science related job after completing his bachelor’s degree was with the Biological Diversity of the Guianas Shield program in 2005. In the interim between that first job and beginning his Master’s degree, he spent a year backpacking through South America with his future wife and worked at the New York Botanical Garden as a herbarium and database assistant.
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