The Plant Press

“E.D.” and the elusive Bidens

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 2021.

By Julia Beros.

Sitting on a 5-acre green space and playground in Cooper’s Poynt Waterfront Park in Camden, New Jersey is a public art piece called Camden Turntable. SLO Architecture used discarded plastic bottles and facemasks to build Turntable. (photo by Andreas Symietz)

Here is a new lawn of grass; which means here also are clovers and violets, arabidopsis, interloping purslane, a line of cherry trees, stalky earthbound lamiales, some broadleaf plantains, sagewort, and some type of vetch. “My brother operates that type of crane at his job,” he begins as he points across the grassy lawn to fields of industry, spotted with clusters of these cranes sprouting upward as they lattice the sky with their branching arms appointed with yellow hooks that sway gently in the wind. The points hang downward like the achened barb awns of Bidens bidentoides, burrs ready to claw their way into a new spot of dirt.

Bidens bidentoides along a freshwater intertidal shore. (photo by Timothy G. Howard, courtesy of New York Natural Heritage Program)

“He once saw a new guy lift a shipping container up for the first time,” the story continues, “but he forgot to lock it properly and it tipped in the air. One by one, brand new BMW cars came sprinkling out.” He bobs his head in dismay at the very story he has surely told before and continues on his walk around the park leaving our conversation as seamlessly as he entered. I look out to the edge of the bike path and watch the waves of the Delaware River like pleats unfolding as they enter New Jersey. Now the site of a 5-acre green space and playground, Cooper’s Poynt park in Camden, was once the site of a jail, and before then a site of growing industry in a push to increase the use of these ports. And before that this was the site where Elias Diffenbaugh plucked a branching cluster of yellow-topped Bidens bidentoides just before their achenes could sprinkle to the ground. While on site installing a public art piece invoking the history of the changing ports and illegal industrial dumping, attracting the attention of park-goers and passersby, I wondered too about the ecological history of this site defined by urbanization: how has this landscape been defined by botany?

“Beggarticks,” or just Bidens, is an estuarine composite genus with a wide temperate and tropical global distribution. Bidens bidentoides is an increasingly rare species confined to just a straggling few pockets of tidal marsh in the Northeastern United States: the Delaware estuary, the Hudson estuary, and (somewhat debatably) the Chesapeake estuary. In a genus with a diversity described as “chaotic,” B. bidentoides itself made its way through three name revisions, described first by Nuttall as Diodonta bidentoides, then revised as Coreopsis by Torrey and Gray, and finally landing in Bidens under Britton’s description. A plant that grows in mostly disturbed areas, often observed growing among detritus and decaying wood, this species is distinguished from other local ones by its lack of ray florets, simple lanceolate leaves, and antrorsley barbed awns (Smith 2014). As its seed dispersal is adapted to local diffusion near the parent plant, B. bidentoides’ greatest threat is habitat destruction. Clusters of remaining plants remain isolated from each other as well, diminishing the gene diversity which could heighten the vulnerability of this species to extirpation.

By the numbers

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 2021.

The staff of the Department of Botany continues to make a strong push to make the U.S. National Herbarium’s collection of over 5 million specimens available online. The Botany Specimen Catalog is available at https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany/?ti=2. As the current pandemic continues, Botany staff sequestered in their homes continue to accomplish the goals of a fully accessible catalog of specimens. Below are some notable numbers and figures from the digitization project:

___________

4.14 million

The number of catalog records online

___________

3.6 million

The number of catalog images

___________

577,000 and 635,000

The number of catalog records and images, respectively, added in 2020

___________

95%

The percentage of all pressed sheets that have a catalog record

___________

325,000

The number of cryptogam (lichens and bryophytes) catalog records coming online soon

___________

Top 5

The country with the most collections is the United States, followed by Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru

Maria A. Faust (1930-2021)

From the forthcoming Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 3, July 2021.

Dr. Maria Anna Faust, research botanist emerita from the Department of Botany, passed away on April 24, 2021 at the age of 91 from medical complications related to stroke.

Faust specialized in tropical marine dinoflagellate taxonomy and ecology. Born in Hungary, she received a BA (1951) from the Agricultural University of Budapest. Shortly after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, she fled to Yugoslavia with her husband and infant daughter. There they lived in a refugee camp for 20 months before immigrating to the United States. She then earned her MS (1962) in microbiology at Rutgers University and her PhD (1970) in aquatic microbiology at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Maria Faust, 2010. (photo by the Smithsonian Institution)

Faust began her Smithsonian career at the Radiation Biology Laboratory (SRBL) in Rockville, MD in 1973. After this laboratory was closed and staff reassigned, she worked at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, MD and ultimately joined in 1987 the Botany Department, National Museum of Natural History-Museum Support Center in Suitland, MD, where she worked until her retirement in 2009. In her 40 year career, she published over 120 research papers. Her most notable publication is “Identifying Harmful Marine Dinoflagellates” (Contributions from the United States National Herbarium 42: 1-144; 2002). In 2004, Faust received the Award of Excellence by the Phycological Society of America. And in 2010, she was a co-recipient of the Tyge Christensen Award for the best paper published in Phycologia in 2009 for a monograph on the toxic dinoflagellate genus Gambierdiscus.

Faust was a mentor and a great source of inspiration for many microbiologists and phytoplankton taxonomists, not just those starting their scientific research but also those well established in their careers. Her microscope skills (Scanning Electron Microscope, light and dissecting) were impressive, detailed, and artistic. Her eagerness to share her knowledge and passion for dinoflagellate research has left a lasting impression on many. Her wisdom, kindness, and eagerness to help others will always be remembered.

Faust, predeceased by her husband Dr. Miklos Faust, is survived by her daughter, Judit Quasney and son-in-law Thomas Quasney of Silver Spring, MD, her grandchildren, Evan Quasney of Mercer Island, WA, Daniel Quasney of Washington, DC, and two great grandchildren.

The botanical pressed specimen sheet – an artform in itself

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 2021.

By Sylvia Orli and Erika Gardner.

We appreciate the botanical pressed specimen for so many reasons–the plant, the taxonomy, the genetic material, the history, and the incredible value it provides to science. We have also come to appreciate the pressed botanical sheet for itself, the beauty and brilliance that the collection can engender by simply being secured onto paper with a label. The U.S. National Herbarium has now created over 3.5 million botanical specimen images, and they are magnificent because of the skillfully crafted botanical sheets.

The Platycerium, or staghorn fern, captures the imagination with its outreaching tines. In this image, you can imagine an elk horn or fingers stretched out. Collection: Gereau 3316, Madagascar, March 1989.

The specimens at the Herbarium are mounted by a skillfully trained team of 21 volunteers. This team carries on a special tradition of best practices and standards, which have been in existence since the 18^th century. Our plant mounters do not have any formal training in Botany, but they possess special skills that transfer well in the specimen preparation realm. Many of our mounters are excellent needle crafters! These skills are highly desirable in the specimen preparation room.

The first step to mount a specimen is to arrange it on an 11”x 18” archival herbarium sheet of paper. In its post-mortem state, the plant should look very similar to how it was growing in the wild. Challenges ensue when the plant is larger than the standard herbarium sheet. The plant must be mounted skillfully and arranged creatively for it to be a valuable specimen for scientific investigation. It is a beautiful balancing act where art and science blend seamlessly on a sheet of paper.

Very seldom do we encounter the unconventional specimen, examples include, the “oh, so rare happy face” specimen, the heart shaped specimen, or even the railroad track specimen. These creations tend to produce a chuckle and sometimes a post on social media, but for the serious researcher these works of rogue pieces of art are highly discouraged.

Pasoh pigs as agents of forest diversity: a "silver swining”

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 2021.

A new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B (288: 20210001; 2021) identifies the role that wild pigs play in maintaining the hyperdiverse structure of tropical forests, challenging the one-dimensional characterization of pigs as destructive enemies of the ecosystem.

A pig nest at the Pasoh, Malaysia ForestGEO forest dynamics plot. (image by Luskin et al. in Proc. R. Soc. B)

When pigs are preparing to give birth, they create a nest using 200-300 tree saplings. In 1996 and 1998, Kalan Ickes (a co-author on the paper) excavated pig nests at ForestGEO's Pasoh forest dynamics plot in Malaysia and recorded all tree census tags he found. FRIM (Forest Research Institute Malaysia) has managed and led the Pasoh plot in partnership with ForestGEO since 1985, and field crews have conducted a total of seven censuses there. By using ForestGEO census data alongside the pig nest surveys, they were able to determine the size, species, and original location of 1,672 stems that pigs used in the construction of their nests. They found that pigs typically nested in flat dry sites and that this habitat preference determined which tree species were killed. The interesting twist was that common tree species habitat associations also tended to favor the flat dry sites where pigs prefer to give birth. As a result, pigs increased the mortality of common species and consequently increased species evenness at the stand-scale.

Although the pigs are native to Malaysia, oil palm plantations on the boundaries of Pasoh provide a consistent food source, and the pig population is now unusually large. As such, their role in maintaining diversity through nesting may be undercut by sheer volume of these impacts.

“While pigs may contribute to diversity, these findings must be viewed in context,” said Stuart Davies, director of the ForestGEO program and a co-author of the study. “One has to remember, the hyper-abundance of wild boar in a number of Asian forests is dramatically reducing tree regeneration, while supporting lianas, and this is likely altering the functional composition of these forests. This may have long-term deleterious consequences for Asian rainforests.”