The Plant Press

Summer interns in botany gain mentor-guided experience

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

-Contributions from Gary Krupnick, Laurence Dorr, Erika Gardner, Rose Gulledge, Alice Tangerini, Jun Wen, Kenneth Wurdack, and Robert Costello.

While the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in quiet hallways and empty offices, the return to the office has led to in-person activity. The summer months are a conundrum—some staff travel to international conferences and field expeditions, but new voices fill the herbarium as a new crop of interns and volunteers make their presence known. The summer of 2023 was no exception, with a handful of eager individuals learning and contributing to science in the Department of Botany. Here we present an overview of the fresh faces that visited this summer for training and research.

The Natural History Research Experiences (NHRE) is a 10-week summer research internship program for undergraduates at the National Museum of Natural History funded by the National Science Foundation. From May 30 to August 4, Botany hosted two NHRE interns, Jillian Cieslik and Luke Sparreo. NHRE interns work closely with scientific mentors on independent research projects. Project results were presented at a poster session for NMNH staff, as well as during a public outreach day in the exhibit halls, and the results are being prepared for publication.

Larry Dorr, Jillian Cieslik, and Kenneth Wurdack with Lindera specimens in the herbarium. (photo by Smithsonian Institution)

Kenneth Wurdack and Larry Dorr mentored Jillian Cieslik, a senior at Ball State University (Indiana) with interests in plant microbiology and genetics. Her project, “Establishing phylogenetic relationships and distinctions of the North American Lindera,” was to sort out a complex of native spice bushes using molecular techniques. She examined relationships among North American spicebushes (three species of Lindera and two species of Litsea; Lauraceae), with a special emphasis on species delimitation in the bog spicebush, Lindera subcoriacea, a rare southeastern USA wetland species, which has been considered questionably distinct from the widespread Lindera benzoin. Plastid genomes were assembled, and several nuclear genes were sequenced that resolved relationships of these species and confirmed that L. subcoriacea should be treated as a distinct species. Cieslik plans to continue her focus on Botany and attend graduate school next year.

Natural History Research Experiences (NHRE) intern Luke Sparreo of Connecticut College collecting Vitis simpsonii (Sparreo #1) on Plummers Island. (photo by Jun Wen).

Jun Wen, Greg Stull, and Alicia Talavera hosted NHRE intern Luke Sparreo from Connecticut College. Sparreo worked on the project “Discovering a new genus of the grape family Vitaceae and exploring tropical-temperate transition in plants.” This project focused on a potential new plant genus, Neoampelocissus, and its relationship with other genera in the grape plant family, Vitaceae. The phylogenomic results from the study show that the Neoampelocissus group is sister to the grape genus Vitis rather than the genus Ampelocissus, where the small group of c. six species of Neotropical Ampelocissus species have been placed. The Neoampelocissus group is found in tropical regions of Central America, while most species of its likely sister group, Vitis, occur in the north temperate regions. DNAs of Neoampelocissus species from silica gel preserved samples and herbarium specimens were sequenced using the target enrichment approach, targeting 1013 nuclear genes. The newly generated sequence data were compared with previously analyzed species of the grape family to place the new genus into a greater phylogeny. Seeds of Neoampelocissus and its close allies were imaged microscopically and measured for 14 diagnostic characteristics to add a morphological component to the project. The results support a New World origin for the Neoampelocissus – Vitis group, involving a tropical-temperate transition for the temperate radiations of the grape genus Vitis. Sparreo will apply for graduate school in Botany soon.

New Faces

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

Nicolli Cabello

Nicolli Cabello joined the ForestGEO team in April 2023. She is an intern of David Kenfack doing data management and monitoring for the List of Threatened Species of Plants in the Korup’s plot in Cameroon, Africa. Over the next 6 months, she will complete the same conservation status monitoring for all the species in ForestGEO’s Africa plots. Cabello is a Brazilian forest engineer interested in tropical forests, the Amazon, Lecythidaceae, and biogeography. These foci set her up to work on the recensus of a 100 ha plot in Central Amazon between 2018 and 2019, where she helped to identify, measure, tag, and georeference more than 15,000 Lecythidaceae trees. Once she completes her internship, Cabello plans to apply for a PhD program and continue studying the same botanical family.

Bella Valli

Isabella (Bella) Valli joined the ForestGEO team in May 2023 as an Administrative and Programs Assistant. She received her bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science, with Minors in Animal Behavior and French Studies, from Indiana University in 2022. Before coming to ForestGEO, Bella worked with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service of the Chesapeake Bay performing fieldwork geared towards the preservation of marshland and its threatened and endangered species (avian species in particular) and authoring refuge proposals. In her new role, Valli is able to use her scientific background to support the science that ForestGEO does by ensuring administrative tasks run smoothly and enhancing community outreach.

New faces

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

My name is Carl Johnson, and I am the new Horticulturist over here in the weird and wonderful Botany Research Greenhouses. I moved to the DC area from eastern Connecticut. I got my first years of horticultural experience at Logee’s, a rare and tropical plant nursery. It was there that I developed an appreciation for unique plant species and the nuances of taking care of them. I attended the University of Connecticut earning a bachelor’s degree in Plant Science and Ornamental Horticulture. I had several on-campus jobs and extension internships. I worked in the research and student plant collections as a plant care specialist. I also interned in the plant diagnostic lab where nurseries and homeowners could send in problem plant samples for diagnosis. When the pandemic began, I started making instructional videos for house plant enthusiasts that the UConn extension would share on their YouTube page. I am coming to the Smithsonian Institution from the U.S. Botanic Garden where I worked in the Plant Collections division where I worked primarily with their aroid collection. I live in Capitol Hill Southeast with my dog Sven, a ten-year-old English Setter. My hobbies include hiking and trying out new flavors of ice cream. I am very excited to be here at the Smithsonian and to contribute to this awesome Botany Department.

Summer internships

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 4, October 2022.

This summer, Sundre Winslow, an intern participating in the Natural History Research Experiences (NHRE), worked on a research project, “Tropical to Temperate Transitions in the Genus Prunus” with Richard Hodel, Jun Wen, and Elizabeth Zimmer. Winslow presented her findings at an NHRE symposium in the museum on August 4.

From June 20 to August 12, Alice Tangerini supervised summer intern to botany, Abigail (Abbey) Paradis. Paradis organized, labeled, and made folders for the hundreds of Cuatrecasas illustrations in the Botanical Art Collection, scanned 40 drawings to fulfill a request from a researcher, scanned 25 other new drawings for the Botanical Art Collection and helped scan and organize Poaceae drawings dating from the 1970s and 1980s. Using Adobe software, Paradis was able to optimize the resolution and improve images of the scans. She used Photoshop to improve digital photos for publications. She also illustrated a living specimen collected by Jason Grant from the SI Botanical Research Greenhouses that had been photographed by Leslie Brothers and vouchered but not yet identified. Her drawing, along with images of the specimens, proved it to be Commelina tuberosa from Ecuador, and has now been added to the Botanical Art Collection.

New Faces

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

Kasia Ahern has joined the Botany Department at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) on detail as a Collections Program Technician (CPT). She graduated from the George Washington University with a Master of Arts in Museum Studies, specializing in collections management. While in graduate school, she worked as a collections management intern for the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA) within the Department of Anthropology at NMNH. After graduating in 2015, she worked as a contractor in the Division of Fishes at NMNH. Her primary duties as a contractor were cataloging, rehousing, inventorying, and digitizing film and prints using flatbed scanners as well as importing the images and associated metadata into the musuem’s electronic database system, EMu. She remained a contractor within the Divisions of Fishes and Amphibians & Reptiles until she became a CPT in 2019. While most of her time as a CPT has been spent cataloging and inventorying specimens in the Division of Birds, she briefly worked on rehousing the bryophyte collection within Botany. She began her detail in February 2022.

 

Savannah Mapes, a graduate student in dinoflagellate research, visited the Botany Department on 21-23 June 2022, to work on Dr. Maria Faust’s legacy material. Mapes is a fourth year PhD student at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. She is studying the dynamics of harmful algal blooming (HAB) species in the lower Chesapeake Bay collecting data for the development of enhanced monitoring and mitigation strategies. She is also working on characterizing a local toxin-producing and bioluminescent HAB species, Alexandrium monilatum, describing its life cycle and using molecular techniques to investigate differences between strains. Mapes originally contacted Rose Gulledge for mentorship on a fellowship grant in December 2020. She then planned a visit to Botany and MSC to peruse Faust’s research material and other work-related documents, reprints, and library. Once finally here (she had to wait 1.5 years due to Covid restrictions), she found a treasure trove of HAB and dinoflagellate material from identification guides, teaching notes (complete with sketches), posters, photographs, SEM images, slides, and field notes. Faust’s taxonomic reviews, monographs and learning guides are essential reading for the HAB student; they are heavily used in the classroom as well as in the lab. Mapes’ future plans include continuing her career in scientific research on phytoplankton and creating a summer program for early career marine biology students to learn about the importance of phytoplankton and the marine environment through hands-on, field- and lab-based learning experiences.

New faces

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

José Anibal Medina Vega is a postdoctoral fellow with ForestGEO and NGEE–Tropics working to develop a pantropical analysis of nutrient controls and their impact on tropical tree recruitment, growth, and mortality. He began his fellowship in August 2021. His office is located in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History. Medina Vega received his B.S. at Pan-American School of Agriculture, Zamorano in Honduras and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Forest and Nature Conservation at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Prior to coming to ForestGEO, he had a postdoctoral fellowship in Stefan Schnitzer’s lab at Marquette University in Wisconsin. Medina Vega collected the data for his doctoral dissertation using canopy cranes of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama from 2015 to 2017.

His current fellowship is to develop a pantropical analysis of nutrient controls on lowland tropical forest structure and functional composition. This analysis will be synthesized into a suite of model testbed sites used to evaluate and benchmark model nutrient cycle representations. Medina Vega will use long-term ForestGEO data coupled with recent detailed soil surveys. For his future research, Medina Vega would like to advance the current knowledge of the mechanisms that regulate the dynamics of natural ecosystems, particularly in the tropical forest biome, by incorporating the study of largely ignored life forms, such as lianas and/or palms, to the already more advanced tree research. He aims to investigate their associations and interactions within each other and with the biome. His hope is that his work can provide a more complete understanding of the dynamics of tropical forest systems.

---

David Wickell is conducting a 10-week graduate student fellowship in the Department of Botany during the fall of 2021. He is working with Liz Zimmer using genomic methods to elucidate the evolutionary history of allopolyploid speciation in the genus Isoetes. During his time at the Smithsonian Wickell hopes to use Isoetes as a window into how polyploid lineages form and persist within the range of their well-established diploid parents. In addition to his research into polyploidy, Wickell studies the convergent evolution of CAM photosynthesis in Isoetes as part of his doctoral research in Fay-Wei Li’s laboratory at Cornell University. Prior to starting his PhD, he studied asexual biogeography of apomictic ferns with James Beck at Wichita State University where he received his Master’s degree in Biology. Wickell’s current research interests include fern and lycophyte phylogenetics and niche evolution in nascent polyploids.

A virtual summer experience for natural history interns

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

Natural History Research Experiences (NHRE) was a Research Experience for Undergraduates site at the National Museum of Natural History sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Each summer (2010-2021) NHRE welcomed approximately15-18 exceptional undergraduate students from around the United States to the museum for a 10-week-long research project guided by an NMNH scientist. NMNH curators Liz Cottrell (Mineral Sciences) and Gene Hunt (Paleobiology) co-Directed NHRE.

Isabella Schrader

This year, NHRE intern Isabella Schrader worked with Rebecca Dikow, Mike Trizna, and Alex White (Smithsonian’s Office of the Chief Information Officer), Paul Frandsen and Ashlyn Powell (Brigham Young University), as well as Botany’s Eric Schuettpelz, on a project called, “Using machine learning tools to quantify mercuric chloride staining across digitized herbarium specimens.” The goal of the project was to update a machine learning model that identifies mercuric chloride staining on digitized herbarium sheets and apply it to all digitized species housed at the U.S. National Herbarium.

Schrader presented her results at a NHRE virtual research symposium held for Smithsonian staff on August 5, 2021. All 14 NHRE interns presented their e-posters using the Gather.Town app, a platform that allows participants to move and interact freely within a virtual space using an avatar. The symposium was well-attended by NMNH staff, associates, and volunteers.

New faces

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

Richie Hodel started as a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow in the Botany Department in January 2020. Hodel is working with Jun Wen and Liz Zimmer to use phylogenomic approaches and collections-based deep learning technologies to resolve phylogeny, assess ancient polyploidy, and infer the biogeographic history of Prunus (Rosaceae). Hodel studied the comparative phylogeography of Neotropical mangroves (genera Avicennia, Laguncularia, Rhizophora) for his doctoral work at the University of Florida with Doug and Pam Soltis, completed in 2017. He recently finished his first postdoctoral appointment at the University of Michigan with Lacey Knowles and Stephen Smith studying the comparative phylogeography of montane sedges (genus Carex), and working on phylogenomic methods development. His research interests include the comparative phylogeography of island taxa, biogeography and niche evolution, and tropical-to-temperate transitions.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

Daniel Zuleta is a postdoctoral fellow working on tropical forest mortality with ForestGEO and Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments–Tropics (NGEE–Tropics). His research has focused on understanding the spatial variation in drought-induced tree mortality and biomass dynamics, as well as assessing the interactions between the species’ drought tolerances and their spatial distributions in Amazon forests. As a postdoctoral fellow, Zuleta aims to understand the mechanisms driving tropical forest mortality in order to develop mortality models that can be included in the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator (FATES) model and improve predictions of forest response to environmental changes. He will use long-term forest dynamics data from ForestGEO sites along with annual mortality censuses established by Gabriel Arellano to explore tree death modes and implications on stand carbon dynamics. He will additionally collect data on plant stress attributes and the response of trees to extreme climatic events to infer the physiological mechanisms of tree death. Zuleta is based at the ForestGEO headquarters at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 3, July 2019.

Caly McCarthy joined ForestGEO as Administrative Assistant in April 2019 and is based at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. McCarthy combines her interest in plants with her proclivity for details in this position. Prior to this role, McCarthy worked at Turtle Tree Biodynamic Seed Initiative and lived as a co-worker at Camphill Village, an agricultural community of diverse ages, origins, and developmental abilities in Copake, New York. McCarthy holds a Bachelor of Arts in both history and environmental studies from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

This summer, Jun Wen and Liz Zimmer are co-mentoring Regina Fairbanks, a Natural History Research Experiences (NHRE) student intern who will be a junior at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall. Fairbanks is working on phylogenomics of the ginseng genus, Panax. Kathryn Picard and Eric Schuettpelz are co-mentoring Zahra Domin, an NHRE intern who will be a senior at Dominican University this fall. Additionally, they are co-mentoring Smithsonian interns Noah Olson and Blake Fauskee, both recent graduates of the University of Minnesota Duluth. All three interns are investigating the incidence of asexuality (in the form of apomixis) within ferns and assessing the role apomixis plays in shaping fern biogeographical patterns.