From Plant Press, Vol. 27, No. 2, April 2024.
By Gary Krupnick.
The Department of Botany is pleased to welcome three new members to the department. In December 2023, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed between the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s (APHIS) Plant Protection and Quarantine division (PPQ). The three new scientists (two botanists and one technician) joining the department hail from National Identification Services (NIS) within PPQ. The focus of NIS is to provide rapid identification of plants and plant pests in support of the USDA’s regulatory programs. NIS includes specialists in the fields of botany, entomology, malacology, and mycology, and they serve as the final taxonomic authorities for PPQ’s identification programs. While the missions of PPQ and NMNH are separate and distinct, both provide information and scientific services to a wide array of researchers, customers, and stakeholders in the public and private sectors.
According to the MOU, NMNH will provide space to PPQ/NIS scientists, technicians, and affiliated individuals (e.g., visitors, fellows, interns, contractors) in return for PPQ's performance of collection curation activities. This arrangement will allow PPQ, in conjunction with NMNH and other USDA employee scientists, to effectively perform pest identifications in support of agricultural quarantine inspection, pest detection, emergency and other PPQ programs. PPQ scientists have now joined the NMNH’s Department of Botany and Department of Entomology curating specific taxa within the NMNH botanical and entomological collections. In Botany, they are focused on Asteraceae, Fabaceae, and other plant families with large numbers of federal noxious weeds or other taxa encountered in trade, while in Entomology, the focus is on Coleoptera, Diptera, Lepidoptera, and Hemiptera. The NMNH collections will also grow with the addition of officially identified PPQ botanical and arthropod specimens obtained from port-of-entry interceptions and from other PPQ programs, with specimens originating from locations throughout the world. The PPQ Botany Lab, now fully moved to the NMNH Botany Department, also includes a small reference library as well as a fruit and seed collection including over 6,000 accessions.
The mission of APHIS is to provide credible and timely identifications of insect pests, seeds, and other plant parts intercepted from imported cargo, arriving international travelers, and mail. These identifications help determine if imported items may enter the United States or if an exotic pest or noxious weed should be addressed. The PPQ/NIS staff performs some of these pest identifications and coordinates other identifications with personnel in other PPQ units. Annually, PPQ sends more than 10,000 of its most difficult pest interceptions to NIS and/or the Systematic Entomology Laboratory (SEL) for identification.
In 2017, four PPQ entomologists and two technicians began working in the NMNH Department of Entomology. More recently, in February 2024, two PPQ botanists, Gregory Stull and Vijay Raman, and a technician, Madison (“Maddy”) Dorr, began working in the NMNH Department of Botany.
Greg Stull joined PPQ in September 2023. He received a bachelor’s degree from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2010 and a doctoral degree from University of Florida in 2016. He conducted postdoctoral work at the University of Michigan as a National Science Foundation fellow and the Kunming Institute of Botany in Yunnan, China. His research background includes examinations of extant and fossil biodiversity to better understand major themes in flowering plant evolution ranging from the origin of phenotypic novelties to the role of climate change in shaping plant distributions, diversification, and extinction. In 2023, Stull was an invited speaker of the 20th Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, “New Horizons in the Study of Neotropical Floras.” Stull has published around 40 peer-reviewed papers across the fields of plant systematics, phylogenomics, paleobotany, and biogeography.
Vijay Raman has been with PPQ since September 2023. Raman obtained his master’s degree in Botany from Presidency College, Chennai, India, and earned his doctoral degree in Plant Taxonomy from Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, India. Between 2000 and 2010, he served as a Botanist at FRLHT (Foundation for Revitalization of Local Health Traditions) in Bangalore, India. During this time, he conducted extensive field explorations across various regions of India and was involved in documenting Indian medicinal plants. He collected, prepared, and identified herbarium specimens, and curated the collections at the National Herbarium of Medicinal Plants. He also contributed to the Red Listing and conservation of endangered Indian medicinal plants.
From 2010 to 2023, Raman served as a Botanist at the National Center for Natural Products Research (NCNPR) at the University of Mississippi. In this role, he was responsible for the identification and authentication of botanicals used as dietary supplements. He curated and managed NCNPR’s botanical repository collections, instructed training courses on botanical authentication, and established the University’s scanning electron microscopy core facility, where he served as director from 2018 to 2023.
Raman was recently elected to the International Plant Protection Convention’s Technical Panel for Diagnostic Protocols. He has published three books and over a hundred peer-reviewed research papers.
Maddy Dorr joined PPQ in April 2024. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology, with additional coursework in studied Studio Art and Biology. She has been eager to work in a biological museum setting since she first joined the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History as a remote illustration intern in 2020. After graduating, she gained hands-on experience handling, preparing, sorting, and labeling thousands of insect specimens and associated plant specimens as an intern and contractor in the Entomology Department at the NMNH. She is extremely grateful for the opportunities she has had to work with entomology collections so far, and she is excited to continue growing in this field by learning how to care for botany collections.
In addition to their identification work, Stull and Raman will also conduct systematic research on plant groups of economic or regulatory significance and perform curatorial work on the PPQ fruit/seed collection as well as within the US National Herbarium. Dorr will assist the work of the National Taxonomists by handling shipments of interception plant material, inventorying, and managing the PPQ fruit/seed collection, and performing other technical tasks such as specimen dissection and imaging.
The Smithsonian’s Department of Botany has a long history with USDA. The herbarium had moved back and forth between the two institutions during the earliest years of the herbarium (see The Plant Press Vol. 13, No. 2; 2010). In 1893, the second Secretary of the Smithsonian, Spencer Baird, established the U.S. National Museum and the U.S. National Herbarium. Frederick Coville, Chief Botanist of the Department of Agriculture, was appointed Honorary Curator of Smithsonian’s National Herbarium. During those early years, several USDA botanists such as Orator Fuller Cook, Walter T. Swingle, G.T. Moore, David G. Fairchild, and Bernhard E. Fernow did curatorial work on the collections in the herbarium at the Smithsonian. USDA botanist Albert S. Hitchcock was Custodian of Grasses at the Smithsonian, and after his death, Agnes Chase was appointed Honorary Custodian. In addition, many prominent USDA botanists spent most of their time at the Smithsonian, among them William Edwin Safford and Ivar Tidestrom.
Other NMNH research departments have had and currently have strong partnerships with other affiliated federal agencies, including and not limited to Department of Defense (DOD), Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In some cases, these relationships have been in place for more than a century. Some of these affiliated agencies have a resident working within NMNH. The museum’s association with these federal partners has been highly productive, providing support for and strengthening both scientific research and the national collections. The Smithsonian strives to continue and enhance the scientific synergy of NMNH and their partner organizations through improved bilateral communication and increased NMNH community engagement.
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