The Plant Press

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%":

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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.

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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).

Corpse flower creates a stench in the research greenhouse

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 3, July 2022.

A Titan arum (Amorphophallus titanium) flowered in the Botany Department Research Greenhouses on the afternoon of July 6, 2022, and lasted only 24 hours before the spathe began to shrivel. The flowering was unexpected as the corm was small – no bigger than a basketball – and produced a small inflorescence, only 82 cm tall (not including its stalk).

Titan arum (Amorphophallus titanium) flowering in the Botany Research Greenhouses on the morning of July 7, 2022. (photo by Ken Wurdack)

The Department of Botany has multiple Titan arum corms of varying sizes and had flowerings in 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2013, and 2021, the last of which during the Covid-19 pandemic prematurely collapsed and never fully opened. Some of these flowerings have been put on public display at the U.S. Botanic Garden.

The floral scent of rotten meat can be detected far away and has evolved to entice carrion beetles and flies in Indonesia where the species is native. The inflorescence initially has a female phase when it first opens, followed by a male phase with the anthers releasing copious pollen. Eventually, the plant will then die back and enter a resting phase as an underground corm, after which it will send up a large umbrella-like leaf.

The inflorescence of Titan arum (Amorphophallus titanium) on July 7, 2022. (photo by Ken Wurdack)

Lost South American wildflower named “extinctus” rediscovered (but still endangered) [Video]

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 3, July 2022.

-Adapted from the Field Museum.

Scientific names get chosen for lots of reasons-- they can honor an important person, or hint at what an organism looks like or where it’s from. For a tropical wildflower first described by Smithsonian Botanist Laurence Skog and his colleague Lars Kvist in 2000, the scientific name “extinctus” was a warning. The orange wildflower had been found 15 years earlier in an Ecuadorian forest that had since been largely destroyed; Skog and Kvist suspected that by the time they named the species, it was already extinct (Syst. Bot. Monogr. 59: 1-118; 2000; https://doi.org/10.2307/25027883). But in a new paper in PhytoKeys (https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.194.79638), researchers report the first confirmed sightings of Gasteranthus extinctus in 40 years.

The bright orange flowers of the Ecuadorian cloud forest herb Gasteranthus extinctus, a species once long believed to have gone extinct. (photo by Riley Fortier)

“Extinctus was given its striking name in light of the extensive deforestation in western Ecuador,” says Dawson White, a postdoctoral researcher at Chicago’s Field Museum and co-lead author of the paper. “But if you claim something's gone, then no one is really going to go out and look for it anymore. There are still a lot of important species that are still out there, even though overall, we're in this age of extinction.”

Botanical data for all: The U.S. National Herbarium is digitized! [Video]

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 3, July 2022.

By Sylvia Orli and Julia Beros.

The breadth of collections held at the U.S. National Herbarium (USNH) document the incredible biodiversity and botanical heritage on our planet and serve as the backbone of our work. In service to the public and as the foundation for research, these collections, as they exist now and grow, are at the core of our mission and purpose as an institution. Making these assets available, in physical and digital form, is a fundamental part of fulfilling our responsibility. The USNH is one of the world’s largest and most diverse botanical collections, accounting for nearly 5 million specimens, the digitization of which fulfills our goal to make specimen data and images discoverable and accessible to all.

Since 2015, the Department of Botany and the Smithsonian Digitization Program Office (DPO) have embarked on a joint project to digitize all pressed and packeted plant specimens, which comprise the great majority of our collections. Collaborating with the contracted digitization company Picturae, based in the Netherlands, we have employed a conveyor belt system and a high-throughput approach to realize this ambition. This approach to digitization provides high resolution images and transcriptions of label data for each specimen. These assets are ported to our data catalog and subsequently aggregated with global collections data from other herbaria. By these means, the digitization of the USNH has a huge impact on botanical research throughout the world—collecting and codifying data that can unexpectedly inform the work of researchers near and far.

Untangling the roots of plant genomes: Supporting a 'moonshot' for botany

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 2, April 2022.

Adapted from the Botanical Research Institute of Texas

Research featured in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (119: e2115640118; http://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115640118) highlights the progress of plant genomics and includes a roadmap for the enormous task of sequencing the genomes of plants worldwide.

The article, titled "Green plant genomes: What we know in an era of rapidly expanding opportunities," underscores the significance of this massive endeavor.

"Nearly half a million species of plants inhabit the Earth today and the secrets to understanding nearly everything about them is hidden in the sequences of their DNA (the plant genome)," said W. John Kress, senior author of the paper and Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian. "Plants are the foundation of environments across the planet and deciphering their genomes will be a game changer for understanding nearly all aspects of our own lives, from improving foods and medicines to inspiring artists and enhancing ecosystem stability."

The article highlights the contributions of Global Genome Initiative for Gardens (aka GGI-Gardens), based at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden and Botanical Research Institute of Texas (FWBG|BRIT) and funded by the Smithsonian Institution. Co-author of the article, Morgan Gostel, is the director of GGI-Gardens and has managed the international partnership since it began in 2015. To date, GGI-Gardens has supported the collection and preservation of genomic tissue from more than 10,000 species of plants.

“The biggest challenge to jumpstarting an ambitious genome sequencing project like the Earth BioGenome Project is getting access to high-quality tissue from almost half a million species of plants on Earth,” Gostel said. “With our current technology and expectations for where sequencing technologies are headed in the future, high-quality plant tissue, either from well-preserved or fresh collections is critical.”

One in three tree species face extinction, study finds

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 4, October 2021.

Thirty percent of the world's trees are threatened with extinction, according to the new State of the World's Trees report. The report, compiling work led by the Global Tree Assessment (GTA) and launched by Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), is one of the first assessments of the world's threatened trees and is the culmination of five years of research to identify major gaps in tree conservation efforts.

Examining the globe’s 60,000 tree species, it reveals that 30% (17,500) of tree species are currently at risk of extinction. That means there are twice the number of threatened tree species globally than threatened mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles combined. 

The report reveals that globally over 440 tree species are right on the brink of extinction, meaning they have fewer than 50 individuals remaining in the wild. These species are found all over the world, from the Mulanje cedar in Malawi, with only a few remaining individuals on one mountain, to a species of alani (Melicope balloui) found only in Hawai’i that has not recently been sighted in the wild.

The report finds hope for the future, however, as conservation efforts led by the botanical community worldwide are growing. Identifying which trees are at risk and ensuring these are protected is the most effective way to prevent extinction and restore endangered species. The report reveals that at least 64% of all tree species can be found in at least one protected area, and about 30% can be found in botanic gardens, seed banks, or other ex situ collections, but further action is needed.