The Plant Press

Wings of Life: Pollinator Week 2022 [Video]

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

The week of 20-26 June 2022 was designated as Pollinator Week to mark a necessary step toward addressing the urgent issue of declining pollinator and plant populations. Pollinator Week events included plantings, seminars, and celebrations aimed at lifting up pollinators and the important conservation work being done on their behalf across the world. As a member of the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC), the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) hosted a series of events to mark Pollinator Week.

On June 21, NMNH hosted a virtual discussion, “Reimagining Greenspace for Pollinators,” featuring NMNH conservation biologist Gary Krupnick, Thorne Rankin and Sally Shea (DC Natives), and Sara Via (University of Maryland Extension). During the program, participants learned how to reimagine backyards and urban spaces as working pollinator gardens that support biodiversity. The webinar has been archived and is available for viewing at https://naturalhistory.si.edu/education/after-hours/webinar-reimagining-greenspace-pollinators.

Mister G and Mrs G perform songs about pollinators and other animals during a Pollinator Celebration in Q?rius on June 23.

On June 23, NMNH partnered with the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to host a Pollinator Celebration. During the morning event, museum visitors celebrated pollinators and learned about how we are all connected to pollinators and plants. The celebration included interactive activities and a concert with Latin Grammy Award-winning musician MISTER G. Several learning stations at the event, including one hosted by Gary Krupnick, had giveaways for the visitors, such as flyers, booklets, bookmarks, and posters. The event was held in Q?rius, The Coralyn W. Whitney Science Education Center of NMNH.

As in year’s past, an educational pollinator poster was designed and distributed by the Pollinator Partnership and their partners (including federal agencies, non-profits, and for-profits), to promote Pollinator Week. The 2022 poster, “Wings of Life: Pollinating Butterflies and Moths,” is a celebration of fanciful, jewel-winged pollinators and the essential role they play in pollination, culture, and ecosystem services throughout North America. Butterflies and moths are found in almost every terrestrial ecosystem from deserts to tropical rainforests, and thousands of flowering plants have evolved to rely specifically on their pollination services. The beautiful artwork was drawn by Natalya Zahn, a Vermont-based illustrator and designer deeply inspired by science and nature. Krupnick served as a scientific advisor in the development of the poster.

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.”

An exceptional symposium explores plants on the edge [Video]

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

The 19^th Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, co-hosted by the Smithsonian’s Department of Botany and the United States Botanic Garden (USBG), made a welcome return to the National Museum of Natural History’s (NMNH) Baird Auditorium on May 13, 2022, three years after the last time the event was held in person. The Symposium, “Life on the Edge: Exceptional Plants in Exceptional Places,” was a hybrid event, bringing together five engaging speakers to present their research to both in-person and virtual audiences from around the world. The invited speakers included scientists specializing in conservation, ecology, systematics, and genetics whose research explores plant adaptation and survival in extreme parts of the natural world. The speakers talked about their research on plants (and lichens) growing in exceptional environments, from the tepuis of the Guayana Shield and the steep cliffs of Hawaii to the South African Fynbos, the Mojave Desert, and even New York City. They spoke about natural history and evolution, and the challenges plants endure in the face of climate change and increasing pollution.

Susan Pell (far right) moderates a panel discussion with the symposium’s speakers: (from left) Fabián Michelangeli, Tanisha Williams, Jessica Allen, Jenna Ekwealor, and Ben Nyberg. (photo by Ken Wurdack)

Eric Schuettpelz, NMNH Chair of Botany, welcomed the audience to the symposium and Rebecca Johnson, NMNH Associate Director for Science and Chief Scientist, provided opening remarks. In her comments, Johnson talked about a project, “Life on a Sustainable Planet,” currently in development at NMNH, and she tied the project to the theme of the symposium. She described the new project as, “understanding, explaining, and amplifying the reach, relevance, and impact of the work here at the Smithsonian,” and the relevance to the tens of thousands of species 'on the edge'. Susan Pell, USBG Deputy Executive Director, also provided opening remarks and gave an orientation to the USBG, including a description of the living collections, current online and in-person programming, and their scientific and conservation partnerships.

Specimen collected by Smithsonian botanist in the 1920s determined to be a new species nearly a century later

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

By Jerald Pinson (Florida Museum of Natural History)

A plant specimen that had been collected in northwestern Haiti in 1929 by Smithsonian botanist E.C. Leonard has led researchers from the Florida Museum of Natural History to the discovery of a new plant species, Castela senticosa, which they recommend be designated as endangered. The plant, which grows as a small bush sheathed in an imposing layer of spines, was recently found during a survey to catalog the flora of the Martín García mountain range in the Dominican Republic and compared to the Leonard specimen.

Castela senticosa produces flowers and fruit at the tail-end of the dry season, when most other plants are still dormant. Although risky, this allows them to stand out to pollinators and dispersers that might otherwise miss them in the dense vegetation common during the rainy season. (photo courtesy of Systematic Botany)

“We were collecting everything we came across with the goal of having a complete species list for the entire mountain range,” said lead author Lucas Majure, an assistant curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History and curator of the University of Florida Herbarium.

Hispaniola’s mountains support large swaths of intact tropical dry forests, highly diverse ecosystems that — like the rainforests they border — are globally imperiled due to the combined effects of deforestation, overharvesting and climate change. But although they face the same threats, the destruction of a tropical dry forest might mean the loss of considerably more species. That’s because rainforests are often found in lowland basins, where conditions like rainfall, temperature and soil type are similar over large areas. While species diversity is high, many rainforest plants can have distributions that span hundreds of miles.

Living in harmony with nature: Winners, losers, and the Convention on Biological Diversity

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

By W. John Kress.

A recently published scientific paper documents the imminent decline of thousands of species of plants as a result of the degradation and deterioration of natural environments caused by human greed and recklessness (Plants People Planet; https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10252). As coauthors of that paper, Gary Krupnick and I worked to compile and analyze mountains of data on every species of plant for which we could find information about its current status on the planet.

We categorized each species as a “winner” or “loser” according to how it has responded to the “Lords of the Biosphere,” as our own species has been called by Professor John McNeill of Georgetown University. Plants that are useful to people, such as crops and plantation timber trees, or take advantage of environments altered by humans, such as invasive species, stand a good chance of surviving the current perils facing the planet, which include unrelentless habitat destruction, out-of-control climate change, rampant pollution, and escalating diseases. Such species will be the winners that survive the hazards of the Anthropocene to flourish once again in a future, perhaps hundreds or thousands of years from now, when humans will have less impact. Species that are not useful to people and inhabit threatened ecosystems or are exploited for their useful properties, such as wild medicinal plants, will be the losers. These species will succumb to human-dominated habitats, will decline in number, and may eventually go extinct.

Losers that are useful to humans tend to be overexploited wild species that may be medicinal, ornamental or used for timber. One such species is Ceratozamia kuesteriana, is a cycad threatened by habitat loss and over-collecting. Endemic to the Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico, the one remaining population of this species numbers less than 300 plants. Credit: this image is in the public domain.

Although our conclusions were not what we were hoping for, we were not surprised by the results: among the tens of thousands of plant species we analyzed, the losers by far outnumbered the winners. No, it was not a good outcome. In fact, the result is extremely discouraging, and another indicator that humans, the world’s biodiversity, and the planet are on a dangerous and tragic trajectory if we do not change fast.

It is no coincidence that a week after this publication went to press (although certainly not because of this paper) thousands of international delegates and concerned observers met in Geneva, Switzerland, to prepare for the 15^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which will convene in Kunming, China, later this year. The long-anticipated meeting in Geneva, which is really three separate meetings taking place at the same time: SBSTTA-24 (called the Twenty-fourth meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice), SBI-03 (Third meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation), and WG2020-03 (Third meeting of the Open-ended Working Group on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework), took place over a two-week period, from March 14 -29, to facilitate long-term discussions on how to prevent further loss of biodiversity while at the same time making the benefits of Nature available for human well-being. I participated in the Geneva meetings over those 16 long days as a virtual official Observer representing the Earth BioGenome Project.

Smithsonian study finds more ‘losers’ than ‘winners’ among plants in the age of humans

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

A new analysis spanning more than 86,000 plant species from John Kress, botany curator emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Gary Krupnick, head of the museum’s plant conservation unit, finds that on this human-dominated planet, many more species of plants are poised to “lose” rather than “win.” The study was published in the journal Plants, People, Planet (https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.10252).

Losers that are useful to humans tend to be overexploited wild species that may be medicinal, ornamental or used for timber. One such species is Ekman’s magnolia tree (Magnolia ekmanii), a critically endangered tree only found in Haiti that was most likely harvested for its wood to produce charcoal and building materials. Credit: Copyright Martin Reith, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

From changing Earth’s climate to destroying, degrading and altering ecosystems on a massive scale, human choices now largely dictate the environmental conditions across much of the globe and, as a result, which species of plants and animals can survive and persist and which will go extinct. Species lucky enough to be directly or indirectly aided by human activities are likely to survive and can be thought of as “winners,” while those that are pushed to ecological irrelevance or extinction by those same activities are the ultimate “losers” in evolutionary terms.

Kress encountered this concept of evolutionary winners and losers in the age of humans (known to some researchers as the Anthropocene), in the writings of John McNeill and wanted to see if it might be possible to tally the plant species that were winning and losing now and in the future.

“I actually started this project from a place of optimism,” Kress said. “I had just planted all these trees around my house in Vermont and thought to myself that maybe there are actually more winners than losers, and we are just focused on everything that’s disappearing.”

In the summer of 2019, Kress brought Krupnick into the fold to help compile and analyze the mountains of data required to put every plant species for which there was enough information into the categories of winners and losers. The researchers split the winners and losers into species that are and are not useful to humans.

In addition to these four categories, Kress and Krupnick created four others: Species that appeared likely to win or lose in the future were deemed tentative winners or potential losers, and species that do not seem to be winning or losing at present were considered currently neutral. A fourth and final category included 571 species that have already gone extinct.

To place plants in these categories, Kress and Krupnick combed through databases that listed endangered plant species, economically important species such as crops, invasive and weedy plants, and endangered plants that are involved in legal and illegal global trade.

In total, the researchers were able to place 86,592 species of vascular plants—a large group of plants that have vascular tissue which transport water, nutrients and other substances—into the eight categories that describe their prospects for survival in the Anthropocene. That may sound like an inconceivably large number of species, but it is actually just under 30% of the nearly 300,000 known species of vascular plants. There simply was not enough data to categorize the remaining 70% of global plant diversity, which reflects how much is left to learn about Earth’s botanical riches, Kress said.

The analysis revealed that losers currently outnumber winners, and that losers are likely to continue to outpace winners in the future if human impact on the planet maintains its current trajectory. Kress and Krupnick categorized 20,293 species of plants as losers, with the vast majority of those losing species being identified as not useful to humans. By contrast, the researchers found just 6,913 species of winners, with all but 164 of those species having some human use.

Stamp of approval: A guide to gesneriads on stamps

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

By Larry Skog and John L. Clark.

Stamp-collecting, or philately, is a time-honored hobby that has been indulged in by kings, presidents, and every-day folk since postage stamps first came into use in the 1840s. While stamp collectors or philatelists fill their collections with stamps from many countries or concentrate on a single region, others devote their time collecting special topics such as stamps showing ships, military, cats, or dogs. Some specialize in postage stamps with plants, of which thousands exist from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, thus a never-ending source of opportunity.

Streptocarpus (=Saintpaulia) ionanthus is the most popular gesneriad featured on stamps from around the world. A. Uganda stamp. B. Lithograph from Hooker (1895). C. Liberia stamp. D. Finland stamp. E. Tanzania stamp. F. Maldives stamp. G. Tanzania stamp. H. Cultivated collection of S. ionanthus from the Herrenhäuser Botanic Garden (accession number 2016-G-619). I. Netherlands Antilles stamp. (Image H courtesy of Boris O. Schlumpberger)

We recently published a 3-part series about gesneriads (Gesneriaceae) on postage stamps in Gesneriads, the quarterly journal of The Gesneriad Society (http://www.gesneriads.org). The series covers 73 stamps from 50 countries showing 21 genera and 35 species, hybrids, and cultivars. The first part dealt with New World gesneriads [in Gesneriads 71(2): 5-28. 2021]; the second part has Asian and Western Pacific gesneriads [Gesneriads 71(3): 12-30. 2021]; and the third part featured European and Africa gesneriads [Gesneriads 72(1): 4-26. 2022]. The Botany and Horticulture Library <https://library.si.edu/libraries/botany> at the National Museum of Natural History carries the journal Gesneriads, as do many local, herbaria, and university libraries.

In the articles, each stamp is shown in color, from Skog’s collection of plant stamps (or found and purchased on-line from eBay or other sources). Each stamp image is accompanied by a photo of a wild or cultivated plant of the same species or cultivar from Clark’s vast photo collection, or photos from other gesneriad growers or field collectors.

The goal of the project was to identify images of all postage stamps that feature Gesneriaceae by consulting horticultural and taxonomic literature as well as providing accurately identified photographs of the same species or cultivars from natural or horticultural populations. The authors had much help from gesneriad growers and other specialists, with more than 60 people contributing identifications of the plants on the stamps, providing images of the living plants (many were Clark’s own field photos), and information about the natural history of the species.

A summer of grape escapes: A field work photo journal

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

Jun Wen recently completed two ‘Grape Escapes’—one collecting trip to the southeast United States (August 30 – September 10, 2021) with Sue Lutz, and the other collecting trip to Texas and western Louisiana (September 19-28, 2021) with her long-time collaborator Stefanie Ickert-Bond (University of Alaska, Fairbanks). Wen and her colleagues made important collections and observations throughout the southeast (especially South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Kentucky), as well as Texas and western Louisiana, targeting grapevines (Vitis, Vitaceae), hickories (Carya, Juglandaceae), and rattlebox (Crotalaria, Fabaceae).

Jun Wen and Stefanie Ickert-Bond

While in Texas, Wen and Ickert-Bond visited the John Fairey Garden near Hempstead. Having a unique artistic design by its founder John Fairey, the Garden is a hidden treasure with extraordinary collections from Mexico. The collecting team enjoyed getting to know the Garden via an introduction from botanist Adam Black via FaceBook. The team was given a tour by Executive Director Randy Twaddle and horticultural botanist Wally Wilkins.

The two trips were among many recent grape escapes that Wen had led, setting a foundation to wrap up the taxonomic revision of North American grapes. The studies of Carya and Crotalaria are collaborative work with colleagues at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for DNA-based species identification assay development.

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.

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.