The Plant Press

Specimen spotlight

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 4, October 2022.

The isotype of Chenopodium ucrainicum (Amaranthaceae) was recently processed by the U.S. National Herbarium and was received during the Covid-19 shutdown. Collected in Kyiv, Ukraine on October 2, 2019, the specimen was brought to the herbarium by Konstantyn Romashchenko, Research Associate in the Department of Botany.

The specimen was collected by Sergei Mosyakin, Director of the Kholodny Institute of Botany, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He collected it in the Tatarka historical neighborhood of Kyiv. Described in 2020 by Mosyakin and Bohumil Mándak (Prague, Czech Republic) (Ukrayins'k. Bot. Zhurn. 77: 237–248; https://doi.org/10.15407/ukrbotj77.04.237), it was initially reliably known from just several localities in Ukraine, but now dozens of new sites in central Ukraine are known, which means that it is probably more widespread in Eastern Europe. Its native versus alien status in Europe remains problematic. A late-flowering and late-fruiting species, the new taxon is well isolated from gene flow and hybridization with closely related species that flower earlier in the year.

Sergei Mosyakin with Chenopodium ucrainicum. (photo by Andrew Mosyakin)

Chenopodium ucrainicum is an overlooked B-genome diploid related to C. suecicum and C. ficifolium, meaning that it is a "basic" species that contributed to the recent speciation in the polyploid complex of C. album and its relatives, such as noxious weeds like hexaploid C. album (in a wide sense) and crops like tetraploid C. quinoa. The newly described species will help in understanding the evolution of the group and might prove to be useful for genetic improvement of quinoa crops because of its late development and resistance to cold.

Left: Chenopodium ucrainicum in the southern part of Kyiv Region. Right: Andrew Mosyakin with Chenopodium ucrainicum. (photos by Sergei Mosyakin)

ForestGEO hosts multi-network tree mortality workshop

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 4, October 2022.

The Alliance for Tropical Forest Science (ATFS) convened a workshop July 15-20 in Cartagena, Colombia. During that time, 22 representatives from ten tropical forest networks discussed the pantropical patterns of forest mortality, providing hands-on experience for early-career researchers to participate in international science collaborations that address broad scientific questions.

ATFS is a collaboration of 11 forest science networks across the tropics (ForestGEO, 2ndFor, AfriTRON, ATDN, DryFlor, GEM, RAINFOR, RBA, SEOSAW, TmFO, and TreeCo) made possible through an AccelNet grant from the United States National Science Foundation. ATFS is dedicated to accelerating the research and capacity-building needed to improve understanding of how tropical forests function and to predict how they will respond to and drive future changes in the Earth System.

ATFS is a collaboration between 11 forest science networks across the tropics. 22 participants collectively representing ten networks attended the Cartagena workshop. (photo by Stuart Davies)

José Medina-Vega and Daniel Zuleta are ForestGEO postdoctoral fellows based at the National Museum of Natural History who participated in the ATFS workshop. Below, they share about tropical tree mortality and their time in Cartagena.

Reflections on the Botany 2022 hybrid conference

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 4, October 2022.

The Botany 2022 meeting (July 24-27) was held in person in Anchorage, Alaska, with hundreds of attendees also participating virtually. This was the first time the Botany meeting took on a hybrid format, with both in-person and virtual attendees. In total, there were 1,200 registered botanists representing 38 countries and all 50 U.S. states; more than half of the attendees traveled to Alaska to participate in-person. There were some challenges associated with the hybrid meeting format; Covid-19 was spiking before the meeting and unfortunately some botanists that planned to present in person had to cancel their talks at the last minute because of positive Covid tests.

Several members of the Botany Department participated in the meetings either in-person (Richie Hodel, Jun Wen) or virtually (Laurence Skog, Warren Wagner, Liz Zimmer). Additionally, other people associated with the National Museum of Natural History, or other Smithsonian Units participated in-person (Jenna Ekwealor and Andy Simpson) or virtually (Logan Kistler).

A symposium in memory of Vicki Funk, “A Botanist at the Extreme: Honoring the great contributions of Dr. Vicki A. Funk,” was organized by Jennifer Mandel, Mauricio Bonifacino, Erika Moore, Warren Wagner, and Jun Wen. Seven colleagues including Jennifer Ackerfield, Nicola Bergh, Mauricio Bonifacino, Daniel Jones, Matt Knope, Loren Rieseberg, and Warren Wagner gave presentations covering topics of systematics, biogeography, collections, conservation, development, and genomics. The symposium was co-sponsored by Botanical Society of America (BSA) and International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) and was a well-attended event. A special issue honoring Funk resulted from this symposium will be published in International Journal of Plant Sciences.

Vicki Funk, shown here in Tahiti in 2012, was the subject of a special symposium in her memory, “A Botanist at the Extreme: Honoring the great contributions of Dr. Vicki A. Funk,” at the Botany 2022 meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. The symposium featured presentations covering the systematics, biogeography, collections, conservation, development, and genomics of Compositae (Asteraceae). (photo by Jean‐Yves Meyer)

 

Hawaii Rare Plant Genetics Workshop advances conservation research [Video]

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 4, October 2022.

By Warren Wagner & Gary Krupnick

The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) co-hosted a Hawaii Rare Plant Genetics Workshop from October 2021 to March 2022, featuring 32 speakers over the course of 10 virtual sessions. From those recorded sessions, 19 presentations are now publicly available for viewing as a playlist on NMNH’s Natural History for Scientists’ YouTube channel.

The goals of the 10-day workshop were to better understand how the latest molecular research, especially in the field of genomics, can benefit the ongoing challenges in plant conservation in Hawaii, and to determine when and how to incorporate molecular techniques into species recovery and management. Discussions centered around identifying particular techniques and methods most appropriate for a variety of questions and challenges regularly faced by field biologists in preventing species extinctions. One outcome of the workshop is that the workshop organizers are developing a decision tree for when and how best to utilize molecular techniques in plant conservation practices in Hawaii, and are creating a prioritization scheme that will allow field biologists to prioritize resources in funding and carrying out the highest priority research.

The workshop was part of a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded collaborative project headed by Ann Sakai and Steve Weller (University of California, Irvine), Michael Moore (Oberlin College), Norm Wickett (Chicago Botanic Garden), and Warren Wagner (NMNH via National Tropical Botanical Garden) to capitalize on recent advances in molecular methods for the study of evolution and to allow for considerable enhanced detail of the evolution and conservation of Schiedea, one of the largest Hawaiian endemic lineages in the carnation family, Caryophyllaceae.

The central research goal of the funded proposal is to resolve the evolution of breeding systems in Schiedea, an extraordinarily diverse Hawaiian endemic lineage that serves as a natural laboratory of plant reproductive evolution, using a variety of field- and sequencing-based techniques. Schiedea is one of the most spectacularly diverse clades in any island plant group with respect to pollination and breeding systems, varying from insect to wind-pollinated species, hermaphroditic to dioecious breeding systems, and outcrossing to selfing mating systems.

Flowers of Schiedea have evolved a variety of ways to present nectar. Schiedea is the focal genus of an NSF-funded project employing a suite of high-throughput sequencing tools to better resolve the phylogeny and enhance understanding of trait evolution, especially related to breeding system diversity, which is among the highest exhibited in any island plant lineage. Schiedea has a unique nectary structure where each one has a shaft-like tubular extension that develops to varying extents. This nectary shaft is thin and translucent. Nectar fills the shaft and is extruded from the tip as a drop in species with elongate nectar shafts (A, S. lydgatei) or it forms in a pool on the surface of the sepal in species with recurved nectaries (B, S. verticillata). In the species likely bird pollinated the nectary is enlarged forming a nearly contiguous ring of nectariferous tissue. The abaxial margin of each nectary has a flap-like extension rather than a shaft. The black nectar produced in these species is usually copious and hexose-rich (C, S. obovata). Nectaries tend to be reduced in size in wind-pollinated species (D, S. adamantis). Figure reproduced from Wagner, et al. (2005). Images taken in the greenhouse of the University of California at Irvine; A, C, and D taken by Nobumitsu Kawakubo; B taken by W.L. Wagner.