The Plant Press

Travel Award Recipients to Visit Herbarium

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 4, October 2016.

Travel funds from the Department of Botany were recently awarded to four students to visit and use the U.S. National Herbarium in support of their research. The recipients, their affiliations, and approximate dates of visit are as follows:

• Maria Alves, Ph.D. student at Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana (UEFS), Bahia, Brazil, working under the supervision of Nádia Roque: Study of Aspilia-Wedelia complex and related genera (Asteraceae). Recipient of a Robinson Award, expected to visit in March 2017.
• Nicolas F. Brignone, Ph.D. student Instituto de Botánica Darwinion, Buenos Aires, Argentina, working under the supervision of Raúl Ponzer: Taxonomy and phylogenetics of Atriplex lineages (Amaranthaceae). Recipient of a Ruth and Lyman B. Smith Travel Award, expected to visit in November 2016.
• Ricardo Perdíz, Ph.D. student at INPA, Amazonas, Brazil, working under the supervision of Paul Fine: Study of Protium (Burseraceae) complex aracouchini. Recipient of a Cuatrecasas Travel Award, visit between August and September 2016.
• Wallace Sao Mateus, Ph.D. student at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Brazil, working under the supervision of Jomar G. Jardim: Phylogeny, diversification, and taxonomical revision of Harpalyce (Fabaceae). Recipient of a Cuatrecasas Travel Award, visit during August-September 2016.

The review and selection committee consisted of Pedro Acevedo (Chair), Paul Peterson, and Eric Schuettpelz. These trips will help build institutional collaboration and advance botanical systematics.

Botanical Illustrator, Alice Tangerini, Featured at Smithsonian Libraries Event

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 4, October 2016.

By Alice Tangerini & Robin Everly, with contributions by Sara Cardello

This year, Smithsonian Libraries has been expanding its offering of outreach events to the Smithsonian staff and visitors. In August 2016, Alice Tangerini was the guest speaker for an outreach program the Libraries is calling “Indoor Recess.” Indoor Recess, created and managed by the Libraries’ education specialist Sara Cardello, is a monthly program that began in February 2016. It is a way for the Libraries to showcase their spaces, collections, and staff to an audience they are not often reaching, a younger millennial crowd. The rationale for Indoor Recess is to offer a program where learning takes place, but is more casual and playful during the work day. It is also a way to reach out to museum staff and, in this case, feature the world of botanical illustration.

Alice Tangerini displays samples of her botanical illustrations at the Smithsonian Libraries event, Indoor Recess. (photo by Robin Everly)

Luckily, Tangerini likes to do outreach to all types of groups, so this gave her a chance to discuss her job and botanical illustration with a new group of people. Cardello worked with Tangerini to come up with the program and illustrations to be traced. Botany Librarian, Robin Everly, also worked with Cardello and Tangerini to display contemporary books on botanical illustration from the Botany and Horticulture Library. Amongst the many books on display was the folio sized Flores do Amazonas (1980) by Margaret Mee, a botanical illustrator of Amazonian plants.

Nevertheless, Tangerini’s presentation and art work, which was also on display, was the main event. Tangerini started by giving a presentation on being a botanical illustrator in the Botany Department. This was followed by participants using tracing paper and colored pencils and choosing one of four copied images from rare books to properly trace and color the image on the tracing paper. The participants displayed enthusiasm for the short 30 minutes they had for drawing. The four samples of art included Gloxinia and Dianthus from Gartenflora BD.2 (1853), Alpinia from Monandrian plants of the order Scitamineae: Liverpool: George Smith (1828) and Achimenes mexicana from Houtte, L. van, Flore des serres et des jardin de l’Europe, vol. 9 (1853).

For Everly and other participants, it was fun learning more about Tangerini’s job and helping to host an event which allows people to learn more about the Department of Botany and botanical illustration. Tangerini has been asked to do a similar evening program for Smithsonian Associates in early 2017.

Howard University Herbarium (HUDC) Receives Donation of Ten Herbarium Cabinets from Smithsonian’s Department of Botany

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 4, October 2016.

By Janelle M. Burke, Howard University and Howard University Herbarium

In August 2016, Howard University received a donation of ten herbarium cases from the Smithsonian’s Department of Botany. These custom-built cases will replace the previous cases that were no longer functional. The donation will be used to continue to keep the specimens well-preserved and serve as a source for many student projects.

Howard University graduate student Kirstie Grant (left) and undergraduate student Morinne Osborne at work in the Howard University Herbarium. (photo by Janelle Burke)

The Howard University Herbarium (HUDC) is a collection of ca. 15,000 plant specimens housed in Just Hall on Howard University’s main campus in Washington, D.C. The HUDC herbarium has strengths in collections from the Caribbean (especially Trinidad), District of Columbia and surrounding environs. Collection strengths include the DC Metropolitan region, the Loasaceae and pteridophyte collections.

Janelle Burke (Smithsonian Research Associate) serves as the Director of the Herbarium. Since her arrival at HU in 2013, Burke has been actively contributing to the collection, through local and international expeditions. The collection is a source for several active student projects, including a comparative study of the Flora of Wheaton Park (Maryland) and a synopsis of the Caribbean flora collection.

Burke recently received an award through the National Science Foundation (NSF) to digitize the mid-Atlantic specimens of this collection as part of the Mid-Atlantic Megalopolis (MAM) Project. This project will digitize, image, and database the ca. 3,000 mid-Atlantic specimens housed at HUDC.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 4, October 2016.

Lauren Krizel joined the Center for Tropical Forest Science - Forest Global Earth Observatory (CTFS-ForestGEO) in the July of 2016 as Program Assistant. She earned her B.A. in Environmental Studies from American University and her M.S. in Environmental and Energy Management from George Washington University. Krizel started her career path working with endangered piping plovers on the beaches of New York, and most recently at the Society for Conservation Biology for five years. She is based at the CTFS-ForestGEO headquarters at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

In early July, Marcelo R. Pace joined the Smithsonian’s Botany Department as a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow. He will be working under the supervision of Pedro Acevedo to explore the ontogeny and diversification of wood anatomy in Malpighiaceae and how specific, unusual types of stem secondary growth peculiar to lianas may be correlated with shifts in diversification rates in the family. Pace obtained his Master’s and Doctoral degrees at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, where he explored the anatomical modifications different plant families of tracheophytes have undergone in the shifts from a shrub/tree to vines. His research also included the evolution and development of wood anatomy in Bignoniaceae.

Staff Research & Activities

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 4, October 2016.

Darlingtonia californica (photo by Bort Edwards)

In September, Bort Edwards traveled to Berkeley, California to collect material for the Global Genome Initiative and to conduct his own research into radiations of western North American clades. Vicki Funk’s research group has an ongoing arrangement with the San Francisco Botanical Garden, University of California Berkeley Botanical Garden, and Regional Parks Botanic Garden (Tilden) to collect genome-quality DNA (in silica gel) and voucher specimens, with the understanding that sheets are lodged at both the US and Jepson herbaria. This serves a dual purpose of allowing sampling of many otherwise hard to access species for molecular work as well as initiating a relationship whereby it is hoped that all plants in the three living collections will be vouchered locally as a reference and insurance. All three gardens have remarkably diverse and valuable collections but Tilden is of particular note as it is part of the East Bay Regional Park District, a community supported Special District that has operated independently and for the most part outside of the influence of government administration since 1940, and can be easily overlooked. However this autonomy, and it's location in a climatic sweet-spot, has allowed it to focus on assembling an impressive collection of rare and regional varieties of the Californian flora, and is well worth a visit. Edwards also took the liberty of briefly exploring the north coast of California to collect Compositae with fellow ex-pat post-doctoral fellow Andrew Thornhill (UCB) and his wife Naomi, and satisfied a lifelong ambition of running into Darlingtonia californica in its natural habitat.

In September, Marcelo Pace gave an invited talk at the XX National Botanical Congress of Mexico, in a symposium for early career scientists named “Estudios actuales sobre la magadiversidad vegetal” (= Current studies on plant megadiversity). He presented on how the multiple origins of vines and lianas across the plant tree of life correlate to an increase in anatomical diversity of stems. This diversification is directly influenced by the evolution of novel anatomical architectures called cambial variants, where he showed that in different lineages of rosids and asterids the appearance of cambial variants led to the evolution of astonishing anatomical complexity. Following the congress Pedro Acevedo, Herison Medeiros and Pace went on a very successful field trip to collect specimens in Oaxaca and Chiapas, with the support of researchers of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). The field trip covered 3,000 km and they collected nearly 260 plant specimens from dry forests, mountains and rainforest, which will enrich the U.S. National Herbarium collection.

Robert J. Soreng and Paul M. Peterson attended and presented talks at a conference (Growing the Grass Classification, Systematics Ecology and Evolution – Celebration of Derek Clayton’s 90^th birthday) in London on 18-19 July 2016. Soreng talked about the state of Poaceae classification and databases while Peterson presented a molecular phylogeny and classification of the Cynodonteae (Chloridoideae). It was truly an international event and grass systematists from around the world attended and celebrated Clayton’s many achievements including GrassBase (http://www.kew.org/data/grasses-db.html). Thirty years ago Genera Graminum, Grasses of the World (Clayton & Renvoize. 1986. Kew Bull. Addit. Ser. 13: 1-389) was published just prior to the molecular revolution. Since Genera Graminum, more than 90 percent of the genera have been investigated using molecular methods and our classification of the grasses (subfamilies, tribes, and subtribes) was recently revised: Soreng, R.J., P.M. Peterson, K. Romaschenko, G. Davidse, F.O. Zuloaga, E.J. Judziewicz, T.S. Filgueiras, J.I. Davis and O. Morrone. 2015. A worldwide phylogenetic classification of the Poaceae (Gramineae). J. Syst. Evol. 53(2): 117–137. More about the meeting is available at http://www.kew.org/discover/blogs/kew-science/growing-our-knowledge-grasses.

Presidential Politics

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 4, October 2016.

By Laurence J. Dorr

With presidential politics dominating the news I began to wonder whether or not a president had ever visited the U.S. National Herbarium. Sitting presidents have visited the National Museum of Natural History but as best I can tell none has ever toured Botany. I cannot remember any presidential candidate visiting the museum which is a shame because certainly the museum and herbarium would make a great “photo op” if one wanted to address compelling environmental issues such as biodiversity, extinction, climate change, etc. We have had high ranking officials appointed by the president visit Botany. I remember one sitting cabinet member visiting the herbarium and I know that one retired Supreme Court justice has been given a tour. My complaint about lack of attention from the president or presidential candidates is not an argument that the U.S. National Herbarium lacks connections to the presidency. We in fact have several interesting connections.

Onagraceae is one of the plant families recently digitized as part of our “conveyor belt” project (see The Plant Press 19(1): 1, 13-15. 2016) and when the label transcriptions were reviewed I was reminded that we have a specimen (US01361622) of fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium (L.) Scop.) collected by President Chester A. Arthur in Yellowstone National Park in 1883. The label is typewritten and probably not original. The specimen does have a separate printed annotation that certainly is original. It states simply “Executive Mansion, Washington.” Arthur was suffering from nephritis and the trip to Yellowstone was intended to improve his health. Firewood in bloom would catch anyone’s attention but why President Arthur, who had no particular interest in Botany or natural history, would collect just one herbarium specimen and donate it to the Smithsonian is beyond me. His time away from Washington may have given him a respite but his health did not improve and Arthur died in 1885 after completing his sole term in office. It appears that this Yellowstone fireweed is the only herbarium specimen that we have collected by a sitting American president.