The Plant Press

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.

Behind-the-scenes video takes you inside the Botany Digitization Conveyor project [video]

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

A behind-the-scenes video of the Botany Digitization Conveyor project is now available on YouTube  where you can see the conveyor belt in action and hear about the workflows and processes that made the project such a success. After 6 years of digitizing the US National Herbarium, the digitization project is nearly complete. By January 2022, nearly 4 million catalog records of the herbarium’s botanical specimens will have been digitized, each with a high-resolution image. All flowering plants and ferns, lichens, bryophytes, and algae will be represented online (see the online collection portal). 

The behind-the-scenes video was featured during the “Biodiversity Digitization: A Decade of Success” (Biodiversity Digitization 2021 | iDigBio) virtual conference. Co-sponsored by the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), iDigBio, and GBiF, the two-day conference held on September 22 and 23 celebrated the collective successes of mobilization and efforts to digitize the world’s biodiversity data in the US and abroad. Participation by NMNH staff in the conference included six speakers and four virtual tours of the museum’s collections. Over 800 attendees pre-registered for this event.

The virtual conference provided both detailed looks at specific work being done in digitization, as well as a broad outlook on the meaning and significance of digitized collections. The themes for the two-day conference were innovations, community, grand challenges, what’s next, and looking to the future of digitization.

Other behind-the-scenes tours featured at the conference include those of the Entomology Collection, Molluscs Collection, and Cultural Objects. Each video is part of NMNH’s “Natural History for Scientists” YouTube channel.

A behind-the-scenes video of the Botany Digitization Conveyor project features Sylvia Orli and Victor Shields (Picturae) with an introduction by Eric Schuettpelz.

Native Pollinator Garden Recipe Cards are now available

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 3, July 2021.

The National Museum of Natural History has teamed with the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC), a collaborative body of more than 170 partners, in making Native Pollinator Garden Recipe Cards. These regionally specific cards, available for download at <https://www.pollinator.org/gardencards>, were designed with easy-to-follow guidelines for creating home pollinator gardens that provide a diverse and colorful floral display throughout all growing seasons. The regional cards provide specific recommendations for native plant species to meet the unique environmental characteristics associated with each region and the pollinators that depend on native habitat. Look for these plants where native plants are sold – native plant nurseries and plant sales sponsored by native plant societies, nature centers, and conservation districts.

This Northeast Native Pollinator Garden Recipe Card is one of eight new 2-sided cards designed with easy-to-follow directions for creating home pollinator gardens that provide a diverse and colorful floral display throughout all growing seasons.

Birds, bats, bees, butterflies, beetles, and other animals that pollinate plants are responsible for bringing us one out of every three bites of food. They also sustain our ecosystems and produce natural resources by helping plants reproduce. This service is a precious resource that requires attention and is increasingly in jeopardy. Many populations of pollinating species are in decline and this decline is attributed most severely to a loss in feeding and nesting habitats. Adding natural habitat areas helps. Home gardens can attract and benefit pollinators.

The Native Pollinator Garden Recipe Card series has been designed for the Northeast, Northwest, Intermountain West, Great Plains, Midwest, Southwest, Texas, and Alaska with additional cards coming soon for N. California, S. California, and the Southeast. The recipe cards were a collaborative effort developed by the NAPPC Selecting Plants for Pollinators Task Force of which Gary Krupnick (NMNH) is a member. NAPPC's mission is to encourage the health of resident and migratory pollinating animals in North America. NAPPC raises public awareness about pollinators’ importance to agriculture, ecosystem health, and food supplies, promotes restoration of pollinator habitat, and supports scientific, economic, and policy research. As a founding participant, NMNH has been a collaborative partner of NAPPC since its inception in 1999.

Specimen spotlight

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 3, July 2021.

Murraya paniculata collected by T.K. Ping in Guangdong, China on 28 July 1925.

M-U-R-R-A-Y-A. That's how you spell, Murraya, a genus of flowering plants in Rutaceae, the citrus family. It is also the winning word that earned 14-year-old Zaila Avante-garde the Scripps National Spelling Bee championship in July 2021. She is the first Black-American to win the 96-year-old event, and she hails from Harvey, Louisiana.

Murraya plant species are native to Asia, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. Orange jasmine (Murraya paniculata) attracts bees with its small, fragrant flowers and attracts small frugivorous birds with its oval, orange-red berries. The U.S. National Herbarium houses 70 pressed specimens of M. paniculata, including one collected in southeast China in 1925, coincidentally the same year as the first Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The Department of Botany extends its congratulations to Zaila on her botanically inspired win!

Small, fragrant flowers of orange jasmine (Murraya paniculata) are attractive to bee pollinators. (photo by Andrés Montesinos)

By the numbers

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 2021.

The staff of the Department of Botany continues to make a strong push to make the U.S. National Herbarium’s collection of over 5 million specimens available online. The Botany Specimen Catalog is available at https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany/?ti=2. As the current pandemic continues, Botany staff sequestered in their homes continue to accomplish the goals of a fully accessible catalog of specimens. Below are some notable numbers and figures from the digitization project:

___________

4.14 million

The number of catalog records online

___________

3.6 million

The number of catalog images

___________

577,000 and 635,000

The number of catalog records and images, respectively, added in 2020

___________

95%

The percentage of all pressed sheets that have a catalog record

___________

325,000

The number of cryptogam (lichens and bryophytes) catalog records coming online soon

___________

Top 5

The country with the most collections is the United States, followed by Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru

János Xántus, a 19th century collector

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.

By Julia Beros.

“There are thousands and thousands of ways to dig out a little plant, even if one has to resort to digging with his own nails,” such is the acumen of János Xántus, rather John Xantus, or perhaps Louis Vesey, or potentially and more accurately, J. Xántus de Vesey. A man enrobed by myth and lore Xántus was a famed Hungarian lawyer, then Lieutenant and then exile, but foremost a self-taught collector of plants and animals who contributed to the foundations of the Smithsonian Institution and the namesake to many novel species. Depending on where you look for information he is described as a zoologist, or an ornithologist, a naturalist, but never defined as a botanist. In a recent publication in Ann. Mus. Hist. Nat. Hung. (111: 145-177; 2019) by Daniel Pifkó of the Hungarian Natural History Museum’s Botany Department, researchers endured a massive undertaking of finding and accurately cataloging Xántus’ early plant collections from the 1850s in North America, which were sent largely unidentified and with jumbled data, ultimately delivering clarity and placing his collections in context with its greater and mythic history.

Holotype of Mimosa xanti (Fabaceae) collected in Cape San Lucas, Mexico by János Xántus between August 1859 and January 1860.

Born in Hungary in 1825, Xántus finished his secondary schooling and promptly pursued a legal career. In 1848, the Hungarian Revolution spurred war and Xántus at age 23, equipped with cartographic skills, became a chief lieutenant. He was captured and sent to Austria to be enlisted in the army there, but was soon freed and while fleeing was arrested again in Prague, where he somehow escaped and absconded to the United States. Arriving with seven dollars, Xántus made a career of odd jobs, visiting different cities and leaving “after picking conflicts” with locals, and then enlisted in the U.S. army where his unlikely career in science began. Enlisting under the name “Louis Vesey” his first station was at Fort Riley in Kansas where he met William Alexander Hammond, military physician and neurologist who made a hobby of collecting biological specimens for naturalist friend Spencer Fullerton Baird (Smithsonian Curator who served as Assistant Secretary and then as the Smithsonian Institution’s 2^nd Secretary from 1878-87). The serendipity of this first assignment for Xántus gave him not only opportunity and motivation to collect biological specimens but training and mentorship from one of the world’s leading naturalists of the time as well. As one of Baird’s goals was to make the natural history collections more robust he was happy to enlist more collectors (keeping a vast list of contacts around the continent to solicit for collecting and sending material) and continue building the nation’s collections of a practically unstudied flora, essentially from scratch.

Molecular techniques in focus: Common misconceptions about tissue preservation for DNA

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.

By Gabe Johnson.

Countless Ph.D. research botanists sincerely believe such misconceptions as: ethanol immediately destroys DNA in leaf tissue collections, leaves in both fresh and spent silica gel are equally dry, desiccated tissues rehydrate in absolute ethanol, and that EDTA inhibits all deoxyribonuclease (DNase) activity. Ethanol treatment of plant tissue for molecular studies is especially misunderstood by researchers in recent times, even though it can be a useful tool to improve DNA preservation for molecular studies. In this Information Age with the ability to sequence and process trillions of nucleotides of data in a single study, the capacity to isolate high quality DNAs must advance to utilize these new technologies to their fullest potential. Greater DNA quality and quantity are required for many of these next-generation sequencing methods than were necessary for traditional PCR-based Sanger methods. Obtaining sequenceable DNAs from a more complete taxonomic sampling will require an equally diverse set of DNA extraction tools, including ethanol preservation and pretreatment.

Biological tissues typically undergo a “treatment” such as freezing or drying prior to DNA extraction. The degree to which this treatment preserves the nucleic acid content of the leaf depends on the needs of the researcher and the logistical limitations of the field work. Such treatments can be as simple as allowing harvested leaves to dry in ambient conditions (usually with poor results) or the use of one of an array of desiccants, solvents, buffers, or cryogens (see Funk et al., Biodiversity Data J. 5: e11625; 2017). While a diversity of tissue treatment methods has been used to preserve DNA (i.e., Hamilton et al., Anal. Biochem. 49: 48-57; 1972), by the mid 1990’s silica gel desiccation was the default method for plant systematics studies (Chase et al., Taxon 40: 215-220; 1991). This preservation method has many virtues by being simple, inexpensive, non-toxic, and satisfactory for most major lineages of plants from algae to angiosperms, as well as fungi. However, the resulting DNA quality has limitations, and in particular is more fragmented than if extracted directly using fresh or frozen tissues.

Tissue from a collard leaf, Brassica oleracea L., is preserved in 96% ethanol to preserve DNA. (A) Since vascular tissue contains much less DNA per unit area, the large veins are removed. (B) Leaf lamina is quickly torn into ~1 cm2 pieces by hand. The ruler to the right is in cm. (C) Leaf fragments very easily fit into the mouth of a 50 mL conical vial. (D) The name of the plant and collection information is written in pencil on card stock and inserted into the vial; pencil writing does not dissolve away in ethanol. (E) To prevent excessive evaporation or accidental spills, the cap is sealed with parafilm. (F) The outside of the plastic vial is labeled with a special solvent resistant permanent marker. (G) Leaf fragments sink into the ethanol and chlorophyll leaches from tissues, leaving an off-white color. If the leaf fragments float and remain green after a couple hours, cut tissue into even smaller pieces. Adding isopropanol to the ethanol can also help. (photos by G. Johnson)

Just as DNA in herbarium specimens is better preserved for some lineages more than others, better DNA is extracted from silica dried tissues for certain taxa more than others. Tissue preservation media, dry or liquid, have a dual purpose: to protect the DNA within the tissue and to prepare the tissue for homogenization and efficient DNA isolation. Upon separation from the plant, a leaf undergoes a physiological stress response that initiates many cellular processes related to senescence: wound formation, polyphenol oxidation, and apoptosis. These cellular changes can rapidly degrade the DNA through programmed exonuclease activity and oxidative stress from reactive chemical species used in wound defense.

ForestGEO celebrates 30th anniversary

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.

As 2020 came to a close, the Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) marked three decades as a global research network with a landmark new paper published in Biological Conservation (253: 108907; 2021), “ForestGEO: Understanding forest diversity and dynamics through a global observatory network.” The article describes the network’s history, methodology, contributions to forest science, future directions, and need for ongoing financial support.

What began as a single plot with a powerful new methodology grew into a global network collaborating to examine the drivers of forest dynamics. Every five years ForestGEO field crews at all 71 research sites map, measure, tag with a number, and identify to species every stem with a diameter at breast height or DBH (the standard for measuring trees) equal to or greater than 1 cm in plots that are typically between 15 and 50 hectares. In addition to contextualizing the growth and evolution of the network, the new paper authored by Stuart Davies and an international team of 156 co-authors synthesizes key metrics from each plot in a data-dense table that identifies each site’s area, first census year, tree count, species count, Fisher’s alpha, census count, elevation, mean annual temperature, and mean annual precipitation. This table highlights the diversity of the ForestGEO plots, and it offers a platform from which to consider future cross-site analyses.

The Forest Global Earth Observatory (ForestGEO) is a global network of forest research sites and scientists dedicated to the study of tropical, temperate, and boreal forest function and diversity. The multi-institutional network comprises 71 forest research sites across the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania.

America’s crop cousins are numerous, imperiled, and more needed than ever

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.

Wild cranberries have a sanctuary in West Virginia and wild peppers have a protected area on Arizona’s border with Mexico. But many hundreds of other crop wild relatives native to the United States – including those related to apples, hops, grapes, pumpkins and sunflowers, to mention but a few – do not have designated conservation areas or, even when warranted, protected status.

The cucumber-leaf sunflower (Helianthus debilis Nutt. subsp. cucumerifolius), a wild relative of the cultivated sunflower (Helianthus annuus), is native to Texas. Khoury et al. (2020) modeled the distributions and determined conservation priorities for 600 wild relatives native to the U.S., including this species. (photo by Katarzyna Stepien)

The plight of America’s crop wild relatives is an overlooked subtheme in the era of human-driven biodiversity loss. A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences <https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2007029117> for the first time outlines how poorly protected these plants are: More than half of the 600 plants assessed in the study may be endangered in their natural habitats, while only 7% are well represented in conservation repositories such as public gene banks and botanical gardens. The study was authored by scientists at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Saint Louis University, U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS), Colorado State University, Museo de Historia Natural in Peru, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and NatureServe.

“We don’t usually think of the United States or North America as a hotspot of globally important agricultural biodiversity, compared to regions like the Fertile Crescent, Southeast Asia, or Mesoamerica where so many of the crops we grow originated,” said Colin Khoury, the study’s lead author and researcher at the Alliance of Biodiversity International and CIAT. “But our research shows that there’s a stunning number of native plants that are, or could be, key to the future of agriculture.”

The plants can be found across the U.S., including in Alaska, Hawaii, and in its overseas territories, although certain regions of the continental U.S. are particularly diverse. “We also show that previous efforts to conserve these plants, while laudable, haven’t been sufficient to safeguard this cultural and natural heritage,” said Khoury, who is also affiliated with Saint Louis University and hosted at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA ARS), National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation.

Discovering the hidden pollinators of Platanthera

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 1, January 2021.

A massive community science project using interval photography to capture rare and unknown pollinator relationships across North America has been launched by scientists at Texas A&U University, with guidance from the North American Orchid Conservation Center (NAOCC), Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and the New York Botanical Garden. The goal of the project is to discover and more deeply understand the evolutionary history and trajectory of one of the most speciose groups on North American orchids, Platanthera. The key to unlocking its secrets lies in part in finding its pollinators.

Platanthera huronensis in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Salt Lake City Utah. (photo by Lydia Morley)

As it stands, little is known about pollinator relationships in North American orchids, and Platanthera is no exception. Of the approximately 200 species of North American orchids, just over 100 have published records of pollination. Discoveries of orchid pollinators are important: most flowering plants need pollinators. Pollinators mediate reproduction, gene flow, dispersal, and in some cases even speciation.

In order to understand how the members of Platanthera evolved and diversified in North America, orchid scientists must come to know their pollinators. With this information, researchers will not only be able to unravel how they came to be, but will also be able to predict where they might be now and how they might adjust to climatic and geographic changes in the future.

This project needs your help. We are asking the dedicated and passionate orchid, pollinator, and naturalist communities to go out and document their observations. A strategy for pollinator observation has been devised using interval photography and everyday digital cameras, in the hopes that with enough participants around the continent, even the most elusive relationships can be captured. The pilot study will hopefully be launched this field season. If you are interested in participating, feel free to reach out directly or visit the project website for more information. Contact Lydia Morley at Lydia.morley@tamu.edu, or visit the project website at https://platantherapollinators.wordpress.com/.