The Plant Press

Art by Alice Tangerini: Dendrophthora sp.

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

This new species of mistletoe (Dendrophthora sp.; Loranthaceae) is a preliminary sketch from collections made by Larry Dorr (US) and Basil Stergios (formerly PORT) for the Flora of Guaramacal project, which focuses on the vascular plants of a national park in the Venezuelan Andes. Daniela Canelón, Curator of Herbario PORT, is especially interested in parasitic epiphytes and with the assistance of Miguel Niño, Botany Research Collaborator, and Marcos Caraballo, Peter Buck Fellow, they have determined that the material represents a new, as yet undescribed species. The collections provide a challenge to illustrate in that as they dry the plant color darkens to almost black. Rehydration in a wetting solution is required for dissecting and illustrating the tiny flowers and fruits. Caraballo has been generous in lending Tangerini his books and papers on the genus so that typical views by other illustrators can be studied to show how this particular collection differs from similar species.

Honors and Awards

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

Vicki Funk has been honored by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT). Linda Watson and Lucinda McDade have spearheaded a fundraising effort to establish a new endowment to allow ASPT to make an annual graduate student research grant award in honor of Vicki Funk. Many colleagues have generously contributed so that the effort has been wildly successful and a large endowment has been secured that will allow ASPT to begin awarding an annual Vicki Funk Graduate Student Research Grant in 2020. This ASPT endowment in support of graduate student research joins other named endowed grants that ASPT awards annually to the highest ranked proposals received from graduate student members of the organization. The Vicki A. Funk Grant joins the Rogers McVaugh, William R. Anderson, Shirley and Alan Graham, and W. Hardy Eshbaugh grants in providing up to $1,500, and is intended to help student researchers defray the costs of doing research in any area within plant systematics.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

Daniel Zuleta is a postdoctoral fellow working on tropical forest mortality with ForestGEO and Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments–Tropics (NGEE–Tropics). His research has focused on understanding the spatial variation in drought-induced tree mortality and biomass dynamics, as well as assessing the interactions between the species’ drought tolerances and their spatial distributions in Amazon forests. As a postdoctoral fellow, Zuleta aims to understand the mechanisms driving tropical forest mortality in order to develop mortality models that can be included in the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator (FATES) model and improve predictions of forest response to environmental changes. He will use long-term forest dynamics data from ForestGEO sites along with annual mortality censuses established by Gabriel Arellano to explore tree death modes and implications on stand carbon dynamics. He will additionally collect data on plant stress attributes and the response of trees to extreme climatic events to infer the physiological mechanisms of tree death. Zuleta is based at the ForestGEO headquarters at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

YES! Interns experience a summer of mistletoes and lichens

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

This past summer, the Department of Botany hosted four interns through the Youth Engagement through Science (YES!) internship program at the National Museum of Natural History. YES! is a career immersion and science communication program for youths between the ages of 14-19, who are currently enrolled in high school (grades 9-11) in the Washington D.C. region. The YES! program gives interns practical experience through a hands-on science internship with Smithsonian science staff. In addition to conducting research, the teens also had access to behind-the-scenes tours and field trips, creative studio workshops, college preparatory classes, and the opportunity to create their own TED-type talks. To protect the privacy of these minors, their last names are being withheld in this article.

YES! interns Leah and Nina (left to right) learn laboratory techniques to study the diversity of parasitic mistletoes. (photo by Smithsonian Institution)

Marcos Caraballo mentored two YES! interns, Nina and Leah, on a project exploring the morphological diversity and genomics of parasitic mistletoes. Both interns learned how to perform microscopy work, DNA extractions, PCR amplifications, and sequence editing, and visited the U.S. Botanic Garden to study the diversity of plants growing there. Nina focused her activities on lab work, including purification of DNA from herbarium specimens, primer design, and visualization and interpretation of agarose gel images. Leah delved into plant taxonomy, learning how to dissect flowers and interpret their inner structures, taking high quality images using a modern dissecting scope. Both Nina and Leah presented their summer projects at the YES! program community day on August 2, where each prepared an exhibition and showed mistletoes to museum visitors.

YES! interns Sarah and Maria (left to right) learn laboratory techniques to study the diversity of lichen. (photo by Smithsonian Institution)

Manuela Dal Forno worked with two YES! interns, Sarah and Maria, on the project "Lichen Diversity in the Tropics." The interns learned about lichens in general, especially taxonomic characters and chemical tests, and dove into a focus on identifying bacteria and fungi from different lichen cultures. They selected and photographed cultures, extracted and sequenced DNA, and generated culture guides for future comparisons. Maria and Sarah participated in two outreach programs at Q?rius, teaching museum visitors about lichens and their experience in the internship program. Sarah and Maria also worked alongside Julia Adams, a doctoral student from the University of California at Riverside. Adams was at the museum for 10 weeks conducting research on the systematics of the lichen Acarospora socialis from southwestern United States. During her time here, Adams worked on the taxonomy of 32 samples of this species complex housed at the US National Herbarium and performed lab work to acquire molecular data on these historical specimens.

Doctoral student Julia Adams, YES! intern Sarah, Manuela Dal Forno, and YES! intern Maria. (photo by Smithsonian Institution)

Retirements: W. John Kress

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

John Kress retired on 31 July 2019 after 31 years of service at the Smithsonian Institution. He joined the Department of Botany at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in 1988 first as an Associate Curator and then promoted to Curator. Kress was appointed Chair of Botany in 1997, and he served in that role for nearly nine years. In 2010, Kress was named the Director of the Consortium for Understanding and Sustaining a Biodiverse Planet in the Office of the Under Secretary for Science at the Smithsonian. From 2014 to 2016, he served the Smithsonian as interim Under Secretary for Science.

W. John Kress. (photo by Smithsonian Institution)

A major focus of Kress’ research has been on the order Zingiberales. He has examined reproductive biology, allozyme and molecular variation, and phylogenetic relationships in the group and has been especially interested in the classification, evolution, and pollination biology of the Heliconiaceae. Additionally, Kress has produced a significant body of work on orchids, bromeliads, and other epiphytes. He is the author or co-author on over 300 scientific papers, books, and book chapters.

Kress’ research has led him to explore the Amazon, the Andes, Costa Rica, the West Indies, Madagascar, the South Pacific, tropical Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and Myanmar. He has authored or co-authored about 46 plant taxa and proposed about 150 new combinations. Kress authored The Weeping Goldsmith: Discoveries in the Secret Land of Myanmar, a first-person narrative of his scientific surveys in Myanmar’s teak forests, bamboo thickets, timber plantations, rivers, and mangroves. Kress is also the co-author of A Checklist of Trees, Shrubs, Herbs, and Climbers of Myanmar (Contr. US Natl. Herb. 45: 1-590; 2003), a work that updates four previous editions going back to 1912.

Q?rius botany class: Summer 2019

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

On July 24 and 31, a cohort of scientists from the National Museum of Natural History, Liz Zimmer, W. Carl Taylor, Steven Canty, Julia Steier, Erika Gardner, Shruti Dube, and Gabriel Johnson led classes of local high school students who were working at the museum this summer as Q?rius teen ambassadors and YES! interns. Here, groups of 2 or 3 students were paired with a botanist-mentor and then visited the museum's pollinator and bird gardens to learn to properly collect voucher specimens, log their observations in a field notebook, and use a dichotomous key to determine species identification. Each student was tasked with collecting a different species in the Lamiaceae. Once they returned to the Q?rius lab, the students pressed their collected materials and then mounted pre-pressed specimens on herbarium sheets and completed a herbarium sheet label.

SEM images of Monarda fistulosa (left) and Pycnanthemum muticum (Lamiaceae) (right) taken by Juan Pablo Hurtado Padilla for the summer botany class.

The students made observations of glandular trichomes and floral organs under the dissecting microscopes and compared them to SEM images prepared for the same plants by microscopy educator Juan Pablo Hurtado Padilla (Note, these SEM specimens were prepared using the methanol fixation method described by Talbot & White (2013) Plant Methods 9(36): 1-7 and it is highly recommended). By comparing trichome and pollen ultrastructure, they could begin to understand the range of morphological variation in the microanatomy of plants within the same family. This concept of taxonomic relatedness was explored further by mapping morphological features onto a phylogenetic tree of the mint family. On this phylogeny, the students identified several common herbs in the mint family such as basil, oregano, sage, thyme, spearmint, savory, rosemary, and lavender. Here we discussed what the "officinalis" species epithet means in the context of classical medicine, and students could compare their specimens with renderings printed in herbals by William Turner and Leonhart Fuchs and an Anglo-Saxon codex. The student groups were then given sets of numbered vials containing essential oils from these plants and they were asked to assign the correct name to the different oils based on their smell.

Many of these students will continue to volunteer as members of the Q-Crew and serve as teen ambassadors to museum visitors. It is our hope that this brief introduction to botany will enable them to better orient visitors exploring the various herbarium sheets and plant curiosities on display in Q?rius.

Conveyor belt project hits 2.5 million images

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

This specimen of Magnolia macrophylla (Magnoliaceae), collected in North Carolina in May 1879, is one of the 2.5 million specimens that have been imaged during the Department of Botany’s digitization belt project.

In coincidence with its four-year anniversary, the Department of Botany digitization belt project has hit 2.5 million images, a huge milestone for the department. The number of catalog records in the US Herbarium has reached 3.5 million and is growing quickly. Soon we will see a digital record for almost all of the dicots and monocots of pressed specimens, with the exception of the Poaceae (grasses). With available funding, Poaceae will be next on our agenda. See https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany/ for all records in our catalog, and enjoy the high-resolution images created with care by the botany digitization team.

ForestGEO awards research grants to 7 forest scientists

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

Since 2002, ForestGEO has supported the work of forest researchers through its annual Research Grants Program. Proposals were required to use data from at least one of ForestGEO’s 67 long-term, large-scale research sites and could be put towards a research project ranging from 3 months to 2 years. A panel of reviewers met to assess the merit of 30 proposals in early September and granted over $60,000 among seven researchers. These scholars come from five countries and will cumulatively work in up to 14 ForestGEO research sites.

ForestGEO’s Lambir, Malaysia site is the focus of current scientific fieldwork. (photo by Christian Ziegler)

The grant funds will facilitate research in a host of topics pertaining to forest dynamics, including wood decomposition, mycorrhizal fungi, functional trait diversity, nutrient cycling, and habitat associations. Building global scientific capacity requires support throughout the progression of a scientist’s career, and ForestGEO is pleased to have been able to award funding to four Ph.D. students, two postdocs, and one professor.

A look into the Budapest Herbarium

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

On a recent trip Julia Beros, Botany contactor, accompanied by her sister, visited the Budapest Herbarium. Inspired by the similarities and differences between the herbarium in Budapest Herbarium and the U.S. National Herbarium she recounts some of the tour’s highlights.

 

Curator Zoltan Barina and Julia Beros in the Bupadest herbarium. (photo by Kathryn Beros)

On the corner block of Könyves Kálmán körút is a massive white stucco castle. A relic of Art Nouveau, the “Fairy Palace” at one time housed one of the Royal secondary schools of Hungary, and after a series of various uses it now safeguards the botanical department of the Hungarian Natural History Museum. Zoltán Barina, one of four permanent collections staff in Budapest, gave us a tour of the collections.

The sun radiates in the stillness of the valley, wafting through shallow fields of grass, reflecting off the architectural vestiges of the past, the Baroque facades, the Maria-Theresa yellows, deflecting back over the hills of Buda. A city divided by its own river, here in Pest the herbarium too is split, into the Carpathian and General collections. The Natural History Museum was created in 1802 and the department of Botany in 1870 (around the time the U.S. National Herbarium was formed, 1848). The collections, now surpassing 2 million (with some housed at an offsite extension location), began with a vast deposit from renowned botanist Pál Kitaibel. Frequently referred to as the “Linnaeus of Hungary” for having been the first official collector in the Carpathian basin, and having more than 1,000 names described from his collections.

The herbarium is growing rapidly, having received roughly 150,000 new specimens within the past 15 years from nearby institutions. Though the building underwent renovations in the 1920s it lacks an industrial freezer, making the challenges of running an herbarium more pronounced. Often relying on various chemicals for fumigation, they are still looking for the best way to manage pests in a less than ideal situation. As Barina notes, there are burns from fluoridic acid (no longer in use) on many older sheets. Likewise at the U.S. National Herbarium many older specimens cured with mercury show dark stains, and controlling the spread is a continual chore. One recent acquisition is a collection of around 40,000 specimens from Szeged University of never before fumigated miscellanea. Although some sheets show visible damage many are untouched, which gave researchers a unique opportunity to study natural pest resistance in certain species (or learn which are the tastiest treat for an herbarium stowaway).

Left: Two quasi-books, known as Holz Bücher, camouflaged by their binding made of tree material, act as plant records for various tree collections. Ranging in age some are 130 years old. (photo by Julia Beros); Right: Interior of a Holz Bücher showing different tree parts, and equipped with secret compartments with written descriptions of the plant habits on tiny scrolls. (photo by Julia Beros)