The Plant Press

Speakers announced for the 21st Smithsonian Botanical Symposium

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 1, January 2024.

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History Department of Botany, the United States Botanic Garden, and Smithsonian Gardens will hold the 21^st Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, “Advancing Plant Conservation Through Horticulture,” on 17 May 2024. The focus of the Symposium will be on conservation horticulture, the application of the technical knowledge and practical expertise of growing plants (horticulture) for the advancement of plant conservation. Conservation horticulture is critical in our time of rapid global change if we are to ensure the survival of imperiled plant species. Botanic gardens and conservation organizations around the world maintain diverse and wild-collected ex situ plant collections, care for plants of conservation concern in situ, provide plants for population augmentation and repopulation, and support conservation education and advocacy. Many plants that are extinct or facing extinction in the wild persist in cultivation through such efforts. The 21^st Smithsonian Botanical Symposium will explore these topics and current research on the nexus of plant conservation and horticulture.

The following speakers are confirmed to give presentations followed by a panel discussion:

Jennifer Cruse-Sanders (State Botanical Garden of Georgia), “From dwarf sumac, Rhus michauxii, to turkey beard, Xerophyllum asphodeloides (and other species in between): How conservation horticulture has helped to preserve imperiled species in the southeastern U.S.”

Colin Khoury (San Diego Botanic Garden), “Distributions, conservation assessments, and conservation action for crop wild relatives”

Carlos Magdalena (Royal Botanic Gardens Kew), “The many facets of botanical horticulture”

Abby Meyer (Botanic Gardens Conservation International). "Conservation horticulture capacity at botanic gardens"

Dustin Wolkis (National Tropical Botanical Garden), “Applied seed conservation biology to support seed banking”

The Symposium will be a hybrid event, with invited speakers giving afternoon presentations for both in-person and virtual guests in Baird Auditorium of the National Museum of Natural History, and a poster session and evening reception for in-person guests in the Conservatory of the U.S. Botanic Garden. Optional behind-the-scenes tours of the Smithsonian Gardens and the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History will also be available in the morning before the symposium begins.

Registration and a call for poster abstracts will open on February 1, 2024.

Tracking the climate-influenced north temperate radiation of the grape genus using genomic data

From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 1, January 2024.

By Jun Wen, Richard Hodel, Zelong Nie, and Gary Krupnick.

As a research botanist and curator for almost 20 years at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), Jun Wen has been studying the biogeography of the northern hemisphere and the biogeographic relationships between temperate and tropical elements. She has been actively studying the origin and evolution of eastern Asian and eastern North American disjunct biogeographic pattern in flowering plants since her graduate school days. Wen and her team of colleagues have shown a special interest in the grape genus Vitis (Vitaceae), from which she and her collaborators have been collecting specimens during recent field expeditions in the United States, Mexico, and China. The broad geographic sampling of the grape genus has enabled using this group of plants as a model for improving our understanding of plant biogeography and evolution in temperate North America.

Vitis nesbittiana from Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico. (photo by J. Wen)

The north temperate region was characterized by a warm climate and a rich thermophilic flora before the Eocene, but the early diversifications of the temperate biome under global climate change and biome shift remain uncertain. A recent paper by Wen and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Huazhong Agricultural University, Jishou University, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and NMNH used the grape genus Vitis as a model to unravel the diversification of this economically highly important lineage of plants and provide insights into the temporal and spatial evolution of plants in temperate North America.  The paper, “Climate‐influenced boreotropical survival and rampant introgressions explain the thriving of New World grapes in the north temperate zone,” was published in Journal of Integrative Plant Biology (65: 1183-1203; https://doi.org/10.1111/jipb.13466) and authored by the grape team including Ze-Long Nie, Richard Hodel, Zhi-Yao Ma, Gabriel Johnson, Chen Ren, Ying Meng, Stefanie Ickert-Bond, Xiu-Qun Liu, Elizabeth Zimmer, and Jun Wen.