The Plant Press

Colonization influences worldwide distribution of plant specimens

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 4, October 2023.

-Adapted from Florida State University News.

A recent study that was published in Nature Human Behavior (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01616-7) shows how colonization has contributed to the distribution of plants specimens stored in herbaria collections around the world.

Theobroma cacao, a tropical plant collected from Brazil in 1979, preserved in the collection of the U.S. National Herbarium in Washington, DC.

Plant diversity in nature is generally highest in tropical regions around the equator, with decreasing diversity closer to the poles. Xiao Feng (Florida State University), Daniel Park (Purdue University), and a team of more than 50 authors from 39 countries (including Sylvia Orli from Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History) showed that the plant specimens housed in herbaria in Europe and North America are more comprehensive and diverse than the collections housed in the countries with more natural plant diversity.

By comparing modern finds with collection specimens, researchers can examine how a species has changed over time.

“People can’t travel back in time to observe what plants look like 100 years ago, but herbaria collections give us a way to examine the past,” Feng said. “If you’re a researcher from Brazil, for example, and you want to study what native plants were like a century ago, you may have to travel to another country to examine certain species.”

A guide to collecting plant specimens for the US National Herbarium

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 4, October 2023.

By Jillian Vallance

A specimen is a single plant that can be used as an example of a particular species to be examined by scientists, historians, and artists. Botanists collect specimens to assist in current research, aid in future research, or fill in a botanical blackhole. A botanical blackhole is when there is a location that is largely undocumented or unstudied.

Scientists are not the only ones who can collect specimens. Citizen scientists describe anyone collecting specimens in a non-professional capacity. They may collect to fill a gap in the botanic record, aid in research that is being conducted by a scientist, or for their own personal collection!

Citizen science is a great way to increase scientific knowledge and engage more of the public in the scientific community. If a citizen scientist has a collection of flora and they have received approval from the Department of Botany’s collection manager, they are welcome to send their specimens to the Smithsonian to be mounted and added in the US National Herbarium. For the specimens to be accepted by the museum, the collector must have permission from the landowner to collect, must supply copies of permits, and must provide a formal signed and dated Deed of Gift. The plant should not be on any threatened, endangered, or rare list. Plant apps, such as SEEK and iNaturalist, can be used to obtain an identification in the field.

Please keep in mind the Smithsonian’s botanical collection is exceptionally large and sending in a specimen does not guarantee it will be used for research immediately.

Specimen collection: good practices

Materials needed (Fig. 1):

• Pen
• Field notebook or paper
• Hand pruners or clippers
• Newspaper
• Plant press. Learn how to make your own: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IJZAalKfL4>

Fig. 1: Materials needed for plant collection.

Staff Activities

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 3, July 2023.

Savannah Mapes, Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) graduate student and NMNH-Department of Botany summer intern, shared research on phytoplankton at an Expert Is In session in the Ocean Hall, NMNH on Friday, June 16. She talked about the important role phytoplankton play in our everyday lives and showcased the ecological and financial impact of harmful algal blooms. Though microscopic, they play an enormous role in sustaining life on Earth. There was a lot of interest from school aged children to adults. The microscopes with live algal cultures were a hit as well as Mapes’ bioluminescent phytoplankton costume!

As part of her graduate research, Mapes studies the life cycle of Alexandrium monilatum, a bioluminescent species of dinoflagellate that produces toxic blooms in the lower Chesapeake Bay. She hopes to uncover clues in the life stages to determine why this species creates harmful blooms.

Botany intern, Savannah Mapes, shares research on phytoplankton at an Expert Is In session in the Ocean Hall, NMNH

On May 24, Sylvia Orli gave the presentation “Digitizing the US Herbarium” virtually in the DigiTIPS 2023 meeting series. Digitizing to International Imaging Performance Standards (DigiTIPS) is a series of seminars organized by the Society for Imaging Sciences and Technology (IS&T). Orli’s talk was part of the Innovations and Special Projects session which highlighted organizations and practitioners using innovative or specialized methods for digitization, as well as those working with unique or unusual collections, or under special circumstances.

Laurence Skog and Judith Skog (Research Associate) continue to spend most Wednesdays volunteering in the herbarium at George Mason University (GMUF) as they have since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.

Request for plant exudate samples

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 3, July 2023.

By Jorge A. Santiago-Blay and Joseph B. Lambert

For the past 25 years, Jorge Santiago-Blay, a Research Associate in the National Museum of Natural History’s Department of Paleobiology, and Joseph Lambert, Trinity University, have had a long-standing collaboration on the analyses of plant exudates, the usually sticky and organic substances that many plants produce.

Example of a plant exudate. Resin dripping from an almond tree. (photo by Yintan; licensed under CC BY 4.0)

Although the chemical variation of these materials is enormous, as far as the team knows, plant exudates come in a surprising limited number of molecular types, as revealed by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR). The three most common types are: 1) resins, whose molecular building block is isoprene, a five-carbon molecule; 2) gums, whose molecular units are monosaccharides; and 3) phenolics, whose molecular unit is phenol. Amber, a fossilized resin, is a material noted for its beauty, human uses, and amazing preservation of biological materials. The term “latex”, given for the milky substance that some plants produce, is a chemically meaningless term. Thus far, all “latexes” the team has examined are resins.

Santiago-Blay and Lambert continue to analyze these materials and write scientific papers in peer-reviewed venues. Some recent papers include the study of exudates from ferns, cycads, ginkgo, and gnetophytes (Life: The Excitement of Biology 4: 215-232; 2016), the resinous cargo of a Java Sea shipwreck (Archaeometry 59: 949-964; 2017), and the characterization of phenolic plant exudates by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (Journal of Natural Products 84: 2511-2524; 2021).

If you come across these products out in nature or in collections, please contact Santiago-Blay and Lambert so that they may analyze the exudates via NMR. Santiago-Blay may be reached at [email protected], and Lambert may be reached at [email protected].

By the numbers​: Collections edition

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2023.

The National Collections Program has released its 2022 collection assessment report. Notable numbers and figures for the United States National Herbarium include:

5,003,019

​The total number of specimens housed by the herbarium

 

108,113.63

The number of cubic feet of collection space

 

8,039

The number of new specimens acquired and added to the collections in 2022

 

3,015

The number of specimens sent out on loan for study in 2022

Just three pressed specimens of the 5+ million specimens housed by the United States National Herbarium. The water-lily genus Nymphaea, comprising about 60 species and among the most successful early lineages of flowering plants, is native to all continents except Antarctica. Cultivated varieties of this genus are grown worldwide for their ornamental flowers. Water-lilies are especially diverse in the tropics of South America where these three specimens were collected. (photo by Gary Krupnick)

Relocation of the Botany Research Greenhouse

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2023.

In December 2022, the Department of Botany moved its living collections at the Museum Support Center (MSC) in Suitland, Maryland, to a temporary greenhouse. In February 2023 the 28-year-old Botany Research Greenhouse was razed for the construction of Pod 6. The new replacement greenhouse is under construction at MSC with occupancy scheduled for September 2023.

Top: The new Department of Botany greenhouse under construction, April 2023. The new headhouse sits on left, the new greenhouse foundation is in the middle, and the temporary greenhouse is on right.
Bottom left: Razing of old greenhouse, February 16, 2023.
Bottom right: Interior temporary greenhouse with Botany living collections, April 2023.
(all photos by Ken Wurdack)

Diving into the green algae of Puerto Rico

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2023.

A new taxonomic study of the benthic species of green algae known from Puerto Rico has recently been released. “The marine benthic algal flora of Puerto Rico, II. Chlorophyta and Prasinodermatophyta” by David L. Ballantine, James N. Norris, and Hector Ruiz was published in Smithsonian Contributions to Botany, No. 117.

Illustration of Udotea flabellum, a benthic algal species generally found in sandy, shallow-water habitats to 10 m depths as well as in offshore algal plains throughout the Caribbean Sea.

This treatment covers the two phyla, eight orders, 25 families, 50 genera, and 150 species of green algae that occur in the benthic marine communities in Puerto Rico. The study includes information on type locality, distribution, habitat, descriptive accounts of anatomy, taxonomic status, and an image or illustration of most species. One feature of this series that stands out is the quality of illustrations due to many in situ habit photos by co-author Ruiz.

Puerto Rico is the eastern-most island of the Greater Antilles and defines the northern boundary of the Caribbean Sea, thus the north coast borders the Atlantic Ocean while the remaining coasts face the Caribbean.

The marine algal flora of Puerto Rico has been intensively studied, with reports dating back to the 1800s, and has the best-known algal flora of any island or island group in the region. This is especially true of its deep-water flora that has been the subject of extensive exploration by submarine, dredging, scuba, and technical diving. David Ballantine spent most of his 37-year professional career teaching and studying algae as a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, and his long-time collaborators James Norris (curator emeritus NMNH) and Hector Ruiz (HJR Reefscaping, an environmental consulting group) are coauthoring an entire series including brown, green, and red algae.

This volume represents the second installment of the expected four-part series. Parts I and II feature the brown algae and green algae, respectively. The red algae are an especially large and diverse group; thus, Part III will be issued in two volumes.

A new genomic resource available for Annonaceae

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2023.

Cherimoya (Annona cherimola) has been an appreciated food source since Pre-Columbian times in the Americas. Although it is currently considered an underutilized fruit crop, it is still important at the local level in several regions of Central and South America. It is commercially cultivated in several countries such as Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Spain, and USA (California), among others, and has a clear niche for expansion in regions with subtropical climates. It belongs to the Annonaceae, the largest family on the Magnoliid clade, sister to the eudicot and monocot clades of angiosperms. But, unfortunately, the progress on cherimoya breeding is hindered by the little genetic and genomic information available, which is a critical bottleneck for breeding, selection, diversification, conservation, and evolutionary studies not only of cherimoya but also in other species in the Annonaceae.

Annona cherimola tree, flower, and fruit morphology. (a) Pruned tree; (b) leaves; (c) female stage of the flower; (d) male stage of the flower; (e) fruit; (f) open fruit. (photos by Alicia Talavera; images from Plants People Planet, doi:

In a recently published paper in Plants People Planet (doi: 10.1002/ppp3.10366), Smithsonian Botany postdoctoral fellow Alicia Talavera, researchers Noé Fernandez-Pozo, Antonio J. Matas Arroyo, and professor Iñaki Hormaza from Instituto de Hortofruticultura Subtropical y Mediterránea La Mayora (IHSM La Mayora-UMA-CSIC), Málaga, Spain in collaboration with Aureliano Bombarely from Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Plantas, IBMCP (CSIC-UPV), Valencia, Spain have provided an important resource to fill this knowledge gap, a chromosome-scale genome sequence, which is available at the IHSM subtropicals database, https://ihsmsubtropicals.uma.es/easy_gdb/index.php.

Staff activities [Videos]

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 1, January 2023.

In September 2022, Sylvia Orli participated in the BioDigiCon, a recently rebranded iDigBio summit focusing on digitization and mobilization within the natural history collections. She gave a lightning talk, "A Fully Digitized Herbarium - Workflows to Keep Up 100%," with Ingrid Lin (Botany) and Nathan Anderson (Smithsonian Digitization Program Office) describing the US Herbarium efforts to maintain a fully digitized status for the herbarium's ever growing collection. In addition, in her detail capacity as Digitization Coordinator for NMNH, she participated in the workshop, "Digitization Coordination: Combining Project Management & Digitization Efforts to Benefit Collections, Big and Small," which explored the concept of a centralized digitization program in natural history institutions. The BioDigiCon occurs annually to bring together the global natural history collections communities to discuss digitization topics.

Sylvia Orli’s BioDigiCon lightning talk, "A Fully Digitized Herbarium - Workflows to Keep Up 100%":

---

At a request from Jennifer Brundage (Smithsonian Affiliations), Alice Tangerini traveled to Northfield, Vermont on November 8-10, 2022, to present a lecture and display artwork at the Sullivan Museum. The Sullivan Museum at Norwich University is the only affiliate partner in the Northeast and had a current exhibition on one of their alumni, William Brenton Boggs. Boggs was on the North Pacific Exploring and Surveying Expedition and the U.S. National Herbarium has collections from that expedition. Tangerini’s talk, “Botanical Illustration, Then and Now,” included a history of illustration in publications mentioning the changes in media used and a synopsis of collecting specimens for herbaria, preparation of herbarium specimens, and illustration techniques. She included the story of the series of cactus illustrations made for the Whipple Pacific Railroad Survey of 1854 and how they were discovered in the herbarium. She emphasized the importance of keeping records of illustrations and how they add to our history in the sciences. The talk was well attended with an overflow in another room and recorded for later viewing. Tangerini brought full size copies of illustrations to the lecture and was able to have a small display of the Department of Botany’s Art Collection.

---

On December 1, 2022, Gary Krupnick gave an invited webinar, "A Natural History Approach to Protecting Pollinators" for the Let's Talk Gardens webinar series hosted by Smithsonian Gardens. Pollinators are critical to environmental health, our nation’s economy, and our food security. But many pollinators are in serious decline. Krupnick's presentation provided insight into the natural history of plant-pollinator interactions and how biologists, gardeners, and community scientists can help protect plants and their pollinators. 

Gary Krupnick’s Let's Talk Gardens webinar, "A Natural History Approach to Protecting Pollinators":

A special herbarium visit by the Dugand family

From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 1, January 2023.

By Virginia Vélez Thaxton, horticulturist with the Smithsonian Gardens

As a Smithsonian Gardens employee who loves working with plants, visiting a herbarium is always a treat. In the fall I was lucky to be part of a very special visit to the United States National Herbarium, with some special guests from afar, which I coordinated with Gary Krupnick (National Museum of Natural History).

Gary Krupnick, Beatriz Dugand, David Visbal, and Orlando Visbal examining specimens collected by Armando Dugand. (photo by Virginia Vélez Thaxton)

The guest were representatives of three generations of descendants of Armando Dugand, a Colombian botanist, who collected almost 3,000 specimens from the late 1930s to the 1960s. The specimens are housed at the US National Herbarium and the guest also happen to be my relatives!

The short and emotional visit took place on the morning of October 13. During a visit to Washington DC, my cousin Beatriz Dugand, Armando’s granddaughter, her son Orlando Visbal, and her grandson David Visbal, got the opportunity to see in person some of the plants collected and described by their relative years ago.

The botanist Armando Dugand Gnecco (1906-1971) was an important scientist in his native Colombia during the 20th century. From 1940 to 1953, he was director of the Institute of Natural Sciences of the National University of Colombia, and in 1940 he co-founded the scientific journal Caldasia. He was a member of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT) and the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT). He is author to many taxonomical names in the Colombian flora, with 242 names published according to IPNI (International Plant Names Index).