The Plant Press

Art by Alice Tangerini: Distichophyllum cuspidatum (Dozy & Molk.) Dozy & Molk. and Leskeodon brevicuspidatus (E.B. Bartram) B.C. Tan & H. Rob.

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 2, April 2019.

"Distichophyllum cuspidatum (Dozy & Molk.) Dozy & Molk. and Leskeodon brevicuspidatus (E.B. Bartram) B.C. Tan & H. Rob." illustrated by Alice Tangerini

In a 1990 monograph in Smithsonian Contributions to Botany (Number 75), Benito Tan and Harold Robinson reviewed the Philippine taxa of Hookeriaceae. Their treatment looked at 11 genera and 36 species in this family of mosses. Alice Tangerini illustrated 15 species for this publication, including Distichophyllum cuspidatumi, a widespread species from Malesia and Oceania, and Leskeodon brevicuspidatus, from Papua New Guinea and Mindanao, Philippines. Tangerini worked on the moss drawings in the spring of 1988 using material from the bryophyte collection. She also inked some sketches of cell drawings made by Tan.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 2, April 2019.

Joel Nitta

Joel Nitta joined the Department of Botany as a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow in January 2019. Nitta is working with Eric Schuettpelz and Warren Wagner to investigate the biogeography of pteridophytes (ferns and lycophytes) in the Pacific, with a focus on Polynesia. This project expands on Nitta's Ph.D. research at Harvard University where he examined community assembly of ferns on the islands of Tahiti and Moorea, French Polynesia. Nitta recently completed his first postdoctoral fellowship as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow with Atsushi Ebihara at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tsukuba, Japan, where he developed next-generation DNA sequencing methods to better understand the evolution of fern species complexes. Nitta is interested in pteridophyte systematics, ecology, and evolution, and is enthusiastic about the practice of reproducible data analysis with open-source code.