The Plant Press

New species of Gesneriaceae named after Funk [Video]

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

- Adapted from Nature India.

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, India have discovered a new species of plant in Mizoram belonging to Gesneriaceae.

A newly discovered violet is named Didymocarpus vickifunkiae after American botanist Vicki Funk. (photo by N.S. Prasanna)

The discovery, they say, is the fruit of extensive fieldwork across northeast India and rigorous sifting through plant specimens in herbariums across the world.

The new plant species sheds some light on the unique evolutionary trajectory of flora in the northeastern parts of India. Such findings, the researchers say, are important in designing conservation approaches to protect the fragile ecosystems of northeast India.

Named after the late botanist Vicki Ann Funk from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), the plant (Didymocarpus vickifunkiae) is an endangered species that currently grows in three districts of Mizoram. It grows on moss-covered trees and blooms light pink flowers during the monsoons.

A new species of Pisonia birdcatcher tree discovered in the island of Jamaica

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

By Marcos Caraballo-Ortiz, Keron Campbell, and Sashalee Cross.
-Adapted from <https://marcoscaraballo.com/new-pisonia-from-jamaica/>

The diverse Caribbean islands are now home to a new species of tree. In Jamaica, botanists have described a new species of Pisonia, a genus better known as “birdcatcher” trees.

Tree of Pisonia jamaicensis growing on the summit of a limestone hill in Jericho, St. James Parish, Jamaica. (photo by K. Campbell

Pisonia jamaicensis and published in the Journal of Plant Taxonomy and Geography (Webbia), only grows in the central and western mountains of Jamaica. Unlike other members of the genus, the tree is uncommon and even endangered at some localities.

This species adds to the rich biodiversity of the island that records an endemism of over 30 percent with respect to seed plants.

Jamaica is located in a region that is a biodiversity hotspot, and even though the island has been botanized for centuries, this discovery indicates that there is work yet to be done.

Botanists who found this tree in past years confused it with other more common species, including the Water Mampoo (Pisonia subcordata) from the coasts of Puerto Rico and Lesser Antilles.

Art by Alice Tangerini: Pogostemon guamensis Lorence & W.L.Wagner

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

Illustrating this new species of Pogostemon required some intricate back and forth with the authors Warren Wagner and Dave Lorence as well as careful dissection of the few pressed specimens sent from Kaua`i. Alice Tangerini found images on the web of patchouli (Pogostemon cablin) which helped to reconstruct positions of the leaves and flowers of the new species. Interpretation of tiny hairs on the flower and calyx were crucial and aided by closeup images of Lorence’s initial dissection of the flowers. The final inking was done in Tangerini’s home, then scanned and labeled and figures manipulated in Photoshop back in her office at the National Museum of Natural History. This drawing was the first one completed after the museum restricted access to staff in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic but set the process in place for all following illustrations done since then.

“E.D.” and the elusive Bidens

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

By Julia Beros.

Sitting on a 5-acre green space and playground in Cooper’s Poynt Waterfront Park in Camden, New Jersey is a public art piece called Camden Turntable. SLO Architecture used discarded plastic bottles and facemasks to build Turntable. (photo by Andreas Symietz)

Here is a new lawn of grass; which means here also are clovers and violets, arabidopsis, interloping purslane, a line of cherry trees, stalky earthbound lamiales, some broadleaf plantains, sagewort, and some type of vetch. “My brother operates that type of crane at his job,” he begins as he points across the grassy lawn to fields of industry, spotted with clusters of these cranes sprouting upward as they lattice the sky with their branching arms appointed with yellow hooks that sway gently in the wind. The points hang downward like the achened barb awns of Bidens bidentoides, burrs ready to claw their way into a new spot of dirt.

Bidens bidentoides along a freshwater intertidal shore. (photo by Timothy G. Howard, courtesy of New York Natural Heritage Program)

“He once saw a new guy lift a shipping container up for the first time,” the story continues, “but he forgot to lock it properly and it tipped in the air. One by one, brand new BMW cars came sprinkling out.” He bobs his head in dismay at the very story he has surely told before and continues on his walk around the park leaving our conversation as seamlessly as he entered. I look out to the edge of the bike path and watch the waves of the Delaware River like pleats unfolding as they enter New Jersey. Now the site of a 5-acre green space and playground, Cooper’s Poynt park in Camden, was once the site of a jail, and before then a site of growing industry in a push to increase the use of these ports. And before that this was the site where Elias Diffenbaugh plucked a branching cluster of yellow-topped Bidens bidentoides just before their achenes could sprinkle to the ground. While on site installing a public art piece invoking the history of the changing ports and illegal industrial dumping, attracting the attention of park-goers and passersby, I wondered too about the ecological history of this site defined by urbanization: how has this landscape been defined by botany?

“Beggarticks,” or just Bidens, is an estuarine composite genus with a wide temperate and tropical global distribution. Bidens bidentoides is an increasingly rare species confined to just a straggling few pockets of tidal marsh in the Northeastern United States: the Delaware estuary, the Hudson estuary, and (somewhat debatably) the Chesapeake estuary. In a genus with a diversity described as “chaotic,” B. bidentoides itself made its way through three name revisions, described first by Nuttall as Diodonta bidentoides, then revised as Coreopsis by Torrey and Gray, and finally landing in Bidens under Britton’s description. A plant that grows in mostly disturbed areas, often observed growing among detritus and decaying wood, this species is distinguished from other local ones by its lack of ray florets, simple lanceolate leaves, and antrorsley barbed awns (Smith 2014). As its seed dispersal is adapted to local diffusion near the parent plant, B. bidentoides’ greatest threat is habitat destruction. Clusters of remaining plants remain isolated from each other as well, diminishing the gene diversity which could heighten the vulnerability of this species to extirpation.

Rare lichen unique to Florida discovered in museum collections, may be extinct

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

-Adapted from the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Scientists have found a new species of fleshy verdigris lichen, thanks to DNA analysis of museum specimens. Misidentified by its original collectors, the lichen is only known from 32 specimens collected in North and Central Florida scrubland between 1885 and 1985. Now the hunt is on to find it in the wild – if it still exists.

Heart lichens belong to the genus Cora, whose name is derived from the Latin prefix for “heart,” a reference to the shape of their lobes. (photo courtesy of Robert Lücking)

The lichen, named Cora timucua in honor of Florida's Timucua people, is critically endangered, even more so than the federally protected Florida perforate reindeer lichen, and possibly extinct. Researchers are holding out hope that C. timucua may persist in undisturbed pockets of the state's dwindling pine scrub habitat, though recent searches came up empty.

If Cora timucua still exists, it is most likely living in pockets of undisturbed pine scrub habitat in Florida’s Ocala National Forest, pictured here, and O’Leno State Park, researchers said. (photo courtesy of Dani Tinker, CC BY-NC 2.0)

"The million-dollar question is 'Where is this lichen?'" said Laurel Kaminsky, a digitization manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History and co-author of the study. "The optimist in me says it's still out there."

Kaminsky said the sparse information recorded by the lichen's collectors makes it difficult to retrace their steps. More widespread in the early 20^th century, C. timucua was collected only from the Ocala National Forest and O'Leno State Park after 1968, two of Florida's last remaining scrub ecosystems. Citrus groves and urban developments have replaced up to 90 percent of the state's sand pine scrub.

"If it's anywhere, it's going to take a lot of looking in very specific habitats to find it," Kaminsky said.

A botanical cliff-hanger

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

By Nancy Khan and Warren Wagner.

Dramatic cliffs along the northern coast of Guam rise over 190 m to form a broad limestone plateau that encompasses the most diverse native plant communities of this small Micronesian island. Until recently the biological diversity of Micronesia was not fully understood, but it is now thought that this region contains a higher percentage of endemic plant species per square kilometer land area than any other hotspot of biodiversity. With an area of about 541 km² Guam is the largest and southernmost of the Mariana Islands, but exhibits the lowest percent of endemism of the archipelago (Micronesica 43: 51–100; 2012). This bleak account inspired further investigation of an intriguing, yet unidentified specimen collected in 1994 as part of a floristic inventory for an environmental assessment of Andersen Air Force Base sponsored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).

Coastal limestone cliffs of northeastern Guam. (photo courtesy of Toni Mizerek, from Lorence et al. 2020)

Most of the Guam National Wildlife Refuge (GNWR), about 22,456 acres, is an "overlay refuge" (land that is under the primary jurisdiction of one Federal agency and the refuge purpose is superimposed as a secondary interest) formed by two units: Andersen Air Force Overlay and the Navy Overlay Unit. Although the military mission comes first on these overlay lands, the USFWS assists in protecting native species and habitats. Together with the 1,217 acre Ritidian Unit which is managed solely by the USFWS they comprise the GNWR which was established in 1993 when the area was determined to be critical habitat for six species of plants and animals listed as endangered pursuant to the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966.

Pogostemon guamensis Lorence and W.L.Wagner (Perlman & Wood 14266, holotype PTBG-061045)

A previous collection made within the GNWR by Derral Herbst (USFWS) in 1982 guided botanists Steve Perlman and Ken Wood (National Tropical Botanical Garden) to the unusual plant. The pair searched sharp, jagged cliffs along the coast, repeatedly rappelling down vertical escarpments, eventually locating five subpopulations totaling 113 individuals. Field identification tentatively likened it to patchouli, Pogostemon cablin (Lamiaceae), however it lacked the aromatic oils characteristic of the patchouli plant. Six new collections were made by Wood and Perlman to document the distribution and morphological variation of the subpopulations. Subsequent expansion of the military installation and development of cooperative but parallel conservation plans by the USFWS and the U.S. Air Force hindered opportunities to re-visit the site for further exploration.

The six specimens seemed likely to remain an enigma until Smithsonian Department of Botany lab technician Gabe Johnson became involved. He applied molecular techniques to determine the identity of the plant. Small fragments were removed from four of the specimens collected in 1994. Initial extraction indicated that the DNA was highly degraded, but the application of a precise and intricate methodology yielded two samples with 2 regions each of sequenceable DNA that could be compared to known sequences obtained from GenBank (Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 98: 184–200; 2016). A phylogenetic reconstruction of the genus Pogostemon revealed that while there is superficial resemblance to Pogostemon cablin, the mystery plant was a new species native to Guam and more closely related to three species with origins on the Indian subcontinent.

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/. 

“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.

Global Strategy for Plant Conservation succeeds in aligning actions to protect plant diversity around the world

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

-Adapted from the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity

The Plant Conservation Report highlights the initiatives, actions and innovations carried out over the last 10 years to ensure the conservation of plants through the implementation of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation.

A new report on the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) suggests that while the 16 targets of the decades long plan to protect global plant are unlikely to be met, countries have made considerable progress towards achieving many of them. Such progress is the result of actions under the strategy, with several new initiatives developed specifically to address GSPC targets. In the absence of the GSPC, these actions would not likely have taken place.

These actions include the establishment of a World Flora Online and a Global Tree Assessment. The World Flora Online is led by a Consortium of over 40 key institutions (which includes the National Museum of Natural History-NMNH) to create an open-access web-based compendium of the world’s 350,000 species of vascular plants and mosses (GSPC Target 1 - online flora of all known plants). The World Flora Online provides a comprehensive baseline of knowledge on the world’s plants. The Global Tree Assessment, which aims to have completed Red List assessments for all the world’s tree species by 2020 (GSPC Target 2 - assessment of the conservation status of all known plant species), is of fundamental importance in helping prioritize national actions. The Assessment aims to ensure that no tree species becomes extinct, despite showing that currently one in five tree species globally are known to be threatened with extinction. The Global Tree Assessment is managed and coordinated by Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) working with the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Global Tree Specialist Group (GTSG). The GTSG has over 80 tree experts from countries all around the world, including members of Smithsonian’s Department of Botany, who are contributing information and carrying out species assessments.

“Plant diversity is crucial in the functioning of all ecosystems,” said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Executive Secretary, Convention on Biological Diversity. “The decline of plant biodiversity is an illustration of a larger problem in our relationship with the natural world. As we work to achieve the 2050 Vision of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, botanic gardens and the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation play a crucial role in protecting biodiversity and fostering stewardship.”

“Like the assessment in the fifth edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook, the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation shows that while there has been important progress, we need greater efforts to achieve the GSPC targets. To reach these goals in the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, we will need the engagement of all actors.”