The Plant Press

Sustaining and Restoring Plant Diversity

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2016.

By Sara Oldfield

One of the important ways that botanists have responded to the global loss of biodiversity is by documenting the plight of rare and threatened species. The Smithsonian Institution has played a lead role in this task for 40 years or more since the early days of working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on red listing plants. Collection data and herbarium specimens continue to be of primary value in assessing the conservation status of plant taxa - a task that is far from complete at a global level. Conservation assessments help to stimulate action for priority threatened species, but with the unfolding impact of climate change, can we afford to ignore the more common elements of plant diversity?

In August 2015 the National Seed Strategy for Restoration and Rehabilitation was launched in Boise, Idaho. The Smithsonian Institution was one of the 12 Federal agencies involved in developing this Strategy. Also involved were over 300 non-federal co-operators of the Plant Conservation Alliance including commercial seed producers and plant nurseries. The National Seed Strategy responds to the national shortage of native seed required for ecological restoration. At a global level, United Nation biodiversity targets call for restoration of 15 percent of degraded land by 2020. In the US, as elsewhere, native seed is required to restore land impacted by fire, the spread of invasive species, overuse, mining, coastal flooding and soil erosion. These threatening factors increase the risk of extinction faced by rare species, but increasingly they impact common species too.

Restoring native plant communities using native plant species of appropriate provenance is a requirement of Federal policies relating to climate change, the need to restore healthy populations of pollinators, and the need to restore fire-damaged sagebrush communities in the western United States. The National Seed Strategy recognizes the challenges of obtaining and delivering adequate quantities of appropriate seed to meet restoration needs which are often difficult to predict. The right seed, often of common "workhorse species," needs to be available for use at the right time and in the right place. Understanding which plant species are appropriate for specific localities relies on an understanding of plant distributions which in turn depend on collection data and herbarium records.

Specimen Digitization Update [Video]

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2016.

Sylvia Orli and Laurence Dorr (fourth and fifth from left) give Smithsonian Institution’s Secretary Skorton (seventh from left) a tour of the Department of Botany’s digitization conveyor project. (photo by Ingrid Lin)

The Botany Department’s digitization conveyor project continues to run full speed ahead. The pteridophytes (ferns and fern allies) were completely imaged in mid-March, totaling 254,442 fern specimens processed through the conveyor. The project continues with Asteraceae and is currently moving at a rate of 3,000 - 4,000 specimens imaged and processed per day. Over 311,000 botanical specimens have been digitized. In addition, through Picturae (the Dutch-based digitization company), more than 100,000 labels from the digitized botanical specimens have been transcribed and are ready to import to the museum’s specimen data catalog.

Additional funds provided by Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office (DPO) will allow the Botany Department to complete the entire Asteraceae family by Fall 2016 and then begin other families. The goal is to find funding to completely digitize the 4.5 million specimens in the U.S. National Herbarium – a lofty goal, indeed, but well worth the effort. The botanical specimens have many stories to tell, and with open access to the data and images, the collections can be queried and analyzed in ways not previously possible.

See a video about the digitization project after the jump...

The Grasses of Egypt

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2016.

The grasses, with about 12,074 species worldwide, have played an important role in the daily life and economy of Egypt for more than 12,000 years. As part of the Fertile Crescent, Egypt lies within the cradle of civilization and the birthplace of agriculture. The cultivation of cereals for making bread and the use of grasses for making baskets, mats, arrows, and building materials has been handed down through humans for centuries. The systematic study of grasses in this region is particularly important since grasses are among the most difficult plants to identify; they often are highly polymorphic and have a generally streamlined morphology.

In “Grass of Egypt,” a new publication in Smithsonian Contributions to Botany (103: 1−201; 2016), Kamal M. Ibrahim, Hasnaa A. Hosni, and Paul M. Peterson provide a vegetative key, glossary of terms, descriptions, index of common names (English and Arabic), and illustrations for 284 native and naturalized grasses that are known to occur in Egypt. In addition, a synopsis of the classification for all grass genera that occur in Egypt is provided and the authors have included a phytogeographical map dividing Egypt into 17 regions in which each grass species has been attributed to one or more regions.

Keys using floral characteristics are the most accurate way to identify grasses, but mature plants or portions of those plants without complete spikelets are often the only available fragment. Under such conditions conventional botanical manuals offer little assistance. Moreover, identification using floral characteristics requires special training in grass taxonomy that is not available to interested amateurs and field ecologists. Hence the need for alternative ways to make determinations. The authors, along with Konstantin Romaschenko and Robert J. Soreng, have recently initiated a DNA barcode survey of Egyptian grasses and currently have nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer sequences for 93 species (33 percent) and plastid rpl32-trinL sequences for 123 species (43 percent). They hope to gather the missing DNA sequences in the future allowing Egypt to be the first country with a complete set of barcode data to easily identify the grasses.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2016.

Gabriel Arellano recently joined the CTFS-ForestGEO group at the Smithsonian Institution as a post-doctoral fellow. The goal of his research project is to develop an improved understanding of the patterns and causes of tree mortality in tropical forests, based on analyses of existing CTFS-ForestGEO data and new field observations on tree mortality. The study aims to improve a new generation of Earth System Models that are being developed under the joint project "Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment for the Tropics." This collaborative effort will reduce model uncertainty associated with projecting the response of tropical forest ecosystems to global change. Arellano completed his Ph.D. in tropical forest community ecology from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) in 2013. His dissertation addressed floristic composition, beta-diversity, rarity/commonness, and community assembly in both Amazonian and Andean forests of the Madidi region, Bolivia. In 2014 he held a post-doctoral position at UAM where he developed a dominance-based framework for the analysis of species-rich communities, and conducted research on phylogenetic, functional, and taxonomic patterns of diversity along elevational and latitudinal gradients of the Andean flora.

Four “Reflora” students from Brazil are visiting the Department of Botany for the next year. The students are here as part of a project to repatriate information on Brazilian herbarium specimens held in herbaria throughout the world. Over the next year they will be digitizing pertinent specimens in the U.S. National Herbarium and spend time studying different angiosperm groups for their doctoral degrees. The students and their interests are Herison Medeiros (Sapindaceae), Marco Pellegrini (Commelinaceae), Tiago Silva (Orchidaceae), and Valéria Sampaio (Solanaceae). Pedro Acevedo and Mark Strong are serving as the principal departmental contacts for these students.

The “Reflora” students (from left): Tiago Silva, Valéria Sampaio, Marco Pellegrini, and Herison Medeiros. (photo by Ingrid Lin)

Core Collections Management (CCM) was lucky to have Sara Pineda, a biology student from the Universidade Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), return for two weeks during her winter break, in January 2016, to work on a few collection projects. Pineda was here last summer gaining experience in the collection by helping CCM to organize lichens and work on a few special plant mounting projects. Over her winter break, Pineda and Meghann Toner shifted 182 cases. She also filed newly mounted grasses in the permanent collection.

George Wang is a post-doctoral fellow conducting molecular work in the lab of John Kress. Wang first joined the Smithsonian in May 2014 as an Mpala post-doctoral fellow. He is an insect community ecologist interested in plant-herbivore interactions and their effects on community patterns. Wang received his Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and has conducted post-doctoral work at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He has been based at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya for 18 months where he worked with David Kenfack and Scott Miller (Entomology Department) in sampling insects associated with the perennial shrub Solanum campylacanthum. In early 2016, Wang brought his specimens back to the Smithsonian. Wang will be using DNA barcoding to identify the insect species in his collection. His study aims to better inventory the biodiversity of African insects and understand their interactions with plants.

 

Departures

Alain Touwaide and Emanuela Appetiti, after 14 years of fruitful collaboration, left the Smithsonian in April, together with their “Historia Plantarum” book collection and archives on history of botany and ethnobotany to pursue new research and educational opportunities.

Aphorisms for the Field Botanist, with Apologies to Linnaeus (and Poor Richard)

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2016.

By Laurence J. Dorr

Continuing what I hope is a temporary transition, or detail in government speak, from field and herbarium botanist to manager, I find myself occasionally reflecting on what I learned earlier in my career, which I now realize with nostalgia and regret involved considerably more time outdoors than it does now. When I catch myself daydreaming I am surprised that I do not spend as much of my reverie thinking about science per se but rather more esoteric things related to science, especially those things that one tends not to write down. Scientific ideas and insights sooner or later get folded into published articles and books, and some of the knowledge I have gained about certain plants is best conveyed via annotations on specimens. Impressions of fellow botanists or insights into how one manages to overcome obstacles while traveling and in the field tend, however, to be conveyed in conversation. More often than not these glimpses into the secret life of Botanists are only shared among our fraternity and only after pouring a libation or two.

A few of the lessons I have learned can be distilled as maxims or aphorisms for the field botanist. I have struggled to grasp the distinction between these two words: both maxims and aphorisms generally are considered to be short pithy statements conveying some general truth. Examples of the former are well-known and include such famous maxims as Poor Richard’s “a penny saved is a penny earned” (actually “a penny saved is two pence clear”). The definition of aphorism scarcely differs except that a secondary dictionary definition suggests that unlike a maxim an aphorism can also be a concise statement of a scientific principle, especially by an ancient classical author. Interestingly, Botany has a long tradition of aphorisms.