The Plant Press

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/. 

ForestGEO welcomes 72nd plot to the network: Ordway Swisher, Florida, USA

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 4, October 2020.

ForestGEO is pleased to introduce its newest research site, the Ordway Swisher Forest Dynamics Plot, a 23.04-ha upland sandhill forest near Melrose, Florida, USA, that undergoes a regimen of prescribed burning every three to four years (including during the establishment of the plot). Field crews began the census in March 2019 and completed it in February 2020, less than one month before the coronavirus pandemic brought fieldwork around the world to a halt. Staff have entered and screened census data, which is now available upon request in the ForestGEO Data Portal. Dan Johnson and Stephanie Bohlman, both of the University of Florida, are the plot’s Principal Investigators.

Photos of the plot, after the jump...

“What wood is that?”: Expanding the toolbox for species identification

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 4, October 2020.

By Julia Campbell-Such

The National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian holds many beautiful works of art made from wood, but only rarely do our records indicate what species of wood the artist used. This is not unusual for a museum, but it is a shame since so much can be learned about a piece of art from understanding the materials that were used to make it. Artists choose their materials carefully for their physical characteristics but also, especially in the case of art originating on the African continent, for their symbolic value. Certain tree species can impart meaning, or even metaphysical powers, to an object made from its wood. The identification of which tree species used in African art and belongings can help researchers recreate the history of artworks with uncertain provenance and elucidate the symbolic worlds of those who created them.

Tangential section of a sample from the National Museum of African Art Jane Smith Collection of West African Woods, most likely Entandrophragma utile, under 16X magnification.

Increasingly, species identification is also important in the context of the enforcement of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an international treaty to prevent species from becoming endangered or extinct because of international trade. Without proper documentation demonstrating that objects are not made with endangered species, museum artworks travelling to exhibitions abroad may be held, confiscated, or even destroyed by customs officials. Knowing which wood was used can help protect artworks when they travel.

As an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Object Conservation at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, I have been investigating ways to answer the question, “What wood is that?”, for artwork in the museum’s collection for the past two years. Using the Jane Smith collection of 64 hand samples representing over 50 species of West African woods, I have been comparing traditional wood anatomy to newly developed methods that use the tree’s chemistry, as well as its anatomy, to identify it. With the generous support of the Botany Morphology Lab at the National Museum of Natural History, under the supervision of Kenneth Wurdack and the kind, generous tutelage of Stanley Yankowski, I have been preparing and examining wood slides from this collection. I have then been comparing the results of that anatomical analysis to direct analysis in real time mass spectrometry (DART-MS) of the same samples, conducted at the Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute under the supervision of G. Asher Newsome.

Summer explorations: Descubre la historia natural [Video]

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 4, October 2020.

Marcos Caraballo Ortiz teaches students how to draw different types of leaves during the five-day Spanish-language virtual program, ¡Descubre la historia natural!

In early August, scientists from the Departments of Botany, Vertebrate Zoology, and Mineral Sciences joined staff from across the museum to participate in ¡Descubre la historia natural!, the last of a three-week-long online Summer Explorations series hosted by the National Museum of Natural History’s Office of Education, Outreach, and Visitor Experience. The Spanish-language program attracted audiences from across North and South America, as well as participants from Europe. The five-day program was led by educators Odalys Lugo-Morales and Juan Pablo Hurtado Padilla. It featured Efrain Tejada (Museum Educator) and Chris Mooney (Insect Zoo) giving an introduction to the museum, Vanessa Gonzalez (Genomics Scientist) on genomics, Hurtado Padilla (Microscopy Educator) on electron microscopy, Adela Roa-Varon (Ichthyologist) discussing what makes a fish a fish, Marcos Caraballo Ortiz (Botanist) exploring the structure of fruits and seeds, and Gabriela Farfan (Mineralogist) on the art and science of creating gems. 

Pages from a student’s personal natural history field book created during the five-day Spanish-language virtual program, ¡Descubre la historia natural!

The program was recommended for students in grades 3-7, but was open to all ages. Science skills were taught through live webinars, recorded videos, and hands-on activities and projects. During the week, participants were encouraged to create their own personal natural history field books and they were invited to share their entries at the end of the program. All lessons have been archived and are available on the program’s website at <https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/natural-history-summer-explorations/descubre-la-historia-natural> and submissions from the participants can be seen at <https://spark.adobe.com/page/WeEqVWMAgvz1F/>.

Video after the jump...

New funding opportunity for botanic gardens

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 4, October 2020.

By Morgan R. Gostel¹, Jean Linsky¹, Abby Meyer²

Together with support from the United States Botanic Garden and Botanic Gardens Conservation International, the Global Genome Initiative for Gardens (GGI-Gardens) has announced a new funding opportunity for botanic gardens that supports collection and preservation of genomic tissues new to the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN) from botanic gardens. This program will support up to 15 awards of up to $4,500 each.

GGI-Gardens was founded in 2015 with the goal of fulfilling the GGI mission – ­to preserve and understand the genomic diversity of life on Earth ­– for the plant tree of life. Since its beginning in 2015, GGI-Gardens has collected over 400 and 4,500 families and genera of vascular plants, respectively, from 16 active collecting sites and 26 international partners. We hope to collect at least one sample from each family and 50% of genera of plants on Earth. These samples will help facilitate international biodiversity research priorities, such as large-scale genome sequencing projects.

If you are interested in applying, please visit https://www.bgci.org/our-work/services-for-botanic-gardens/global-botanic-garden-fund/bgci-ggi-gardens-partnership-award/

Application deadline: 15 November 2020

GGI-Gardens collecting team in front of the Bartholdi Fountain at the United States Botanic Garden. Left to right: GGI-Gardens intern, Kristen Van Neste; GGI-Gardens Founder and Senior Research Botanist and Curator, Vicki Funk; GGI-Gardens Director, Morgan Gostel; and GGI-Gardens intern, Sarah Gabler. (photo by Kyle Wallick)

¹Botanical Research Institute of Texas and GGI-Gardens, Fort Worth, TX, USA
²Botanic Gardens Conservation International-US, San Marino, CA, USA

Researchers split the birdcatcher trees (genus Pisonia) into three

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2020.

-Adapted from Pensoft

The birdcatcher trees – genus Pisonia – are infamous for trapping birds with their super-sticky seed pods that would frequently entangle the body of the ‘victim’. Left flightless, the poor feathered creatures eventually die either from starvation or fatigue, or predators. Similarly notorious are the birdcatcher trees for botanists, who have been baffled by their complicated classification for the last three centuries. 

Large cabbage trees (Pisonia grandis) dominate the landscape of a small island in the Pacific Ocean. (photo by Jean-Yves Meyer, Délégation à la Recherche de Polynésie Française, Tahiti, French Polynesia)

Smithsonian Research Associate Marcos A. Caraballo-Ortiz and graduate student Elson Felipe Rossetto (Universidade Estadual de Londrina, Brazil) are working to untangle the classification of these trees. A recently published paper appears in the open-access scholarly journal PhytoKeys (152: 121-136; 2020).

The authors of the paper reestablished two genera: Ceodes and Rockia, where both had been previously merged under the name of Pisonia. Now, as a result, there are three distinct lineages of birdcatcher trees from the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans: Ceodes, Pisonia, and Rockia (Nyctaginaceae).

“Previous molecular studies on Pisonia species from around the world showed that species were clustered into three major groups, and here we assign names for each of them. With this new classification, a large number of the species known as Pisonia will be henceforth named Ceodes. This includes the Parapara (Ceodes brunoniana) and the birdlime (Ceodes umbellifera) trees, both native to many islands, including Hawaii and New Zealand. They are commonly planted in gardens for their lush and sometimes variegated foliage, as well as their fragrant white flowers. However, the cabbage tree (Pisonia grandis) will still be technically known as Pisonia,” adds the study’s lead author Felipe Rossetto.

Friedrich Vierhapper and the serendipity of Facebook

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2020.

By Sylvia Orli

For several years, the Department of Botany’s Information Technology team has been reviewing transcriptions of specimen labels returned from the digitization company Picturae and fixing the records that are incorrectly transcribed. Many specimen labels have terrible handwriting. One kind of label consistently puzzled the team. The label is slightly pinkish with a legible taxonomic name, but every other word is written in an unreadable script. Because the team could not read these labels, we imported these records on to the online catalog as “illegible” with the hopes of one day correcting the record.

I posted examples of these labels in the Facebook page “Herbarium Junkies” with the hopes that crowdsourcing might solve the problem. Herbarium Junkies was created in 2012 by Museum Specialist Erika Gardner when she was in graduate school. She made the page as a bit of a joke, dedicated to herbarium devotees like herself, to post funny and interesting items about herbaria. The Facebook group has since ballooned to over 2,000 members, and has a global membership of botanists, herbaria workers, and plant enthusiasts. Group members post confusing labels, interesting herbarium specimens, images of field work, and all sorts of topics related to herbaria.

My illegible label post caught the eye of Clemens Pachschwoll, doctoral student at the University of Vienna, who verified that the label was written in the Kurrentschrift script, a Germanic cursive script popular in pre-WW2 Germany. He also verified that the collector was Friedrich Vierhapper Sr. Vierhapper (1844-1903) and his son, Friedrich Karl Max Vierhapper (1876-1932), were prominent Austrian botanists of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The Vierhappers specialized in the Flora of Austria and other European countries. Vierhapper Jr. has the genus, Vierhapperia, named after him. Clemens put me in touch with Michael Hohla of Austria, who specializes in the Flora of the Innviertel (the western part of Upper Austria). Amazingly, he and his colleagues had published a monograph of the Vierhappers, “Father and son Vierhapper – two lives dedicated to Botany” in 2019 (Stapfia 110: 1-202), and Hohla was delighted to see these inscrutable labels.

A specimen of Luzula silvatica Gandich collected in Austria, May 1887, by F. Vierhapper. Prof. Michael Hohla transcribed this location as “Wälder am Hausruck bei Eberschwang”.

Growing pains in the Type Herbarium

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 2020.

By John Boggan

If you have looked for a type specimen recently in the United States National Herbarium (US), you may have noticed that things have changed…a lot. An ongoing rearrangement of the Type Herbarium has addressed two issues: overcrowding of the collection due to growth, and a phylogenetic arrangement that has become increasingly outdated.

Among the oldest type specimens in the US collection is Banksia integrifolia. It was collected along the eastern coast of Australia (then called New Holland) by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander during Captain James Cook’s first voyage of the ship Endeavour (1768 - 1771).

A botanical type specimen is a physical specimen, usually a pressed herbarium sheet, designated by the author of a new taxon to serve as a permanent reference point for the published name. Type specimens are critical to research as they provide an unambiguous representative of the taxon, provide physical details that a written description may not, and allow subsequent researchers to study and understand how the name should be applied.

In my position as the Type Registrar, I assist the management and curation of the digital records in our Type Register and the physical specimens in our Type Herbarium, one of the largest and most important collections of type specimens in the world. Our type collection is well-documented, with each specimen verified as a type by comparison with the original literature. Our types were among the first specimens in our herbarium to be barcoded, inventoried, and photographed, a task made easier because, unlike some herbaria, our type specimens are segregated from the rest of the collection. All of our types were photographed in the 1980s and while these photos have since been superseded by digital photographs, I still occasionally refer to them on microfiche to document changes in the specimens (e.g., insect or mechanical damage) or to gather data from specimens that have since been lost (a rare occurrence, thank goodness). Under the direction of retired staff member Ellen Farr, our type collection was one of the first in the world to present both our digital records and images of our specimens online.