The Plant Press

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.

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/.