The Plant Press

Described 28 Years Post-Collection, New Grass Species Makes a Strong Case for Conservation

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 3, July 2018.

-Adapted from Pensoft Publishers

Originally collected 28 years ago in Ecuador, new species Poa laegaardiana has been just described, only to find out its prospects for surviving in its type location seem bleak nowadays. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

When roaming in the Cordillera de los Andes of Ecuador, near the village of Facundo Vela, little did Smithsonian scientist and author, Paul Peterson, know that a small grass specimen will not only turn out to be an intriguing new species, but will also make a big statement on the importance of conservation.

Almost three decades after its original collection the new species P. laegaardiana has finally emerged from its herbarium collection, but the story took an unexpected twist.

It took the authors a single Google Earth search to find out that what used to be the natural habitat of the newly found densely tufted bunchgrass, is now occupied predominantly by small farms.

Google Earth image comparison between the area of collection in 2011 and today. With the area having been plowed, chances of the grass still existing there are small, however it may still be found along the margins of the fields. (Photo credit: Left @2018DigitalGlobe; Right @2018Google @2018CNES/Airbus)

Heavy agricultural use of the terrain poses a good possibility for P. laegaardiana to have already been extirpated from this location. With the species currently known only from this area, chances are that this newly described species might in fact turn out to be already extinct.

“Further studies are needed to search the area and browse collections for specimens from different locations,” explains Peterson. “But, in fact, it may well be that with our study we are documenting a possible extinction of a species happening in the space of just 30 years. The story of P. laegaardiana serves to show how human-induced habitat loss can indeed be a major threat to the survival of life on Earth.”

The new species was named after renowned Danish botanist Simon Laegaard, who has made extensive collections in South America, Greenland, Ecuador, and Bolivia (accompanied by the authors) contributing to the documentation of the flora to make informed conservation and management plans.

Celebrating the Summer Solstice with Pollinators

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 3, July 2018.

The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) celebrated National Pollinator Week 2018 in June in an effort to raise awareness of the decline of important pollinator populations. On June 23, the Smithsonian Institution hosted Solstice Saturday, a Smithsonian-wide celebration kicking off the summer season. Nearly every Smithsonian museum in the Washington area, the Smithsonian National Zoo, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland, and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian Heye Center in New York City, extended their hours until midnight, some with special themed and joint programming. NMNH had over 1,000 visitors to its bilingual Pollinator Family Night programs. Over three hours, visitors engaged in a wide variety of activities in Q?rius and Qjr, as well as visiting the Butterfly Pavilion and Insect Zoo.

Barbara Stauffer (Office of Education and Outreach) introduces Kimberly Winter and Gary Krupnick for a question and answer session after a screening of “Pollinators Under Pressure” at a June 2018 Pollinator Family Night event at the National Museum of Natural History. (photo by Laura Cox, Tree Media)

During the Pollinator Family Night event, the film “Pollinators Under Pressure” was featured in the Q?rius Auditorium. The film is about the plight of pollinators around the world and the actions we can all take to ensure their survival and that of humans and ecosystems everywhere. Gary Krupnick (NMNH Department of Botany) and Kimberly Winter (U.S. Forest Service) participated in a questions and answer session with the audience after each of the three showings. The Tree Media film, narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, is available on the website http://www.pollinatorsunderpressure.org and on YouTube (see video below).

Art by Alice Tangerini: Hymenoxys ambigens (S.F. Blake) Bierner var. neomexicana W.L. Wagner

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2018.

Reported from southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, Hymenoxys ambigens is comprised of three local varieties. Variety neomexicana is known from the rocky slopes of the Animas and Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico, and is ranked as imperiled (T2, NatureServe status). In the cover story in this issue of The Plant Press, Robert Edwards finds that soil pH is a strong environmental variable that is uniquely correlated with diversity in the tribe Heliantheae. Tangerini illustrated this variety for Warren Wagner in his treatment of the species in Brittonia (51: 79-86; 1999).

Art by Alice Tangerini: Dryopteris macropholis Lorence & W.L. Wagner

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 2018.

Fern diversity is high on the Marquesas Islands in the southern Pacific. On a recent trip to two islands, Ua Pou and Hiva Oa, researchers from the Smithsonian Institution, National Tropical Botanical Garden, and French Polynesia encountered 82 of the 99 indigenous pteridophyte species (see cover article). Among them was Dryopteris macropholis, an endangered species restricted to the mountains of Ua Pou and Hiva Oa, as well as Nuku Hiva, Ua Huka, and Tahuata (also in the Marquesas). Alice Tangerini illustrated this species from the type specimen and field photographs for a 2011 publication (PhytoKeys 4: 5-51) in which 11 new fern species were described from the Marquesas Islands. This plate was illustrated primarily in pen and ink, but additional stippling was added and parts were rearranged in Adobe Photoshop. The frond and stipe (too large to fit in with the details) appeared on a separate plate.

Hidden Inca Treasure: Remarkable New Tree Discovered in the Andes

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 2018.

-Adapted from Wake Forest News

Hidden in plain sight – that’s how researchers describe their discovery of a new genus of large forest tree commonly found, yet previously scientifically unknown, in the tropical Andes.

Botanist Kenneth Wurdack from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Wake Forest University graduate student William Farfan-Rios detailed their findings in a study just released in the journal PhytoKeys.

Habit, with paired branching and staminate inflorescences, of Incadendron. (photo courtesy of Jason Houston)

Named Incadendron esseri (literally “Esser’s tree of the Inca”), the tree is a new genus and species commonly found along an ancient Inca path in Peru, the Trocha Unión. Its association with the land of the Inca empire inspired its scientific name.

So how could a canopy tree stretching up to 100 feet tall and spanning nearly two feet in diameter go undetected until now?

New Exhibit has Focus on Seeds

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 2018.

By Gary Krupnick

In November 2017, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. opened a new Garden Lounge—a public space to rest and recharge among live plants. This light-filled area displays a variety of plants and interpretative text focused on plant dispersal through seeds and spores. A special section of the lounge for young visitors features seating made from tree stumps and kid-friendly text and graphics. The Garden Lounge is a collaboration between the Office of Exhibits, the Department of Botany, and Smithsonian Gardens.

The Garden Lounge at the National Museum of Natural History serves as a welcoming interior garden rest and recharge area for visitors featuring live plants and a relaxing atmosphere with botany content as a frame.

All our lives are intricately connected to plants. The Garden Lounge invites visitors to explore these connections and learn why and how plants “move” or disperse to survive and thrive. The evolution of seed-bearing plants is highlighted, and the parts of a seed are defined. Seed dispersal by wind, water, force, and animal (including humans) is described.

As visitors walk into the hallway on the second floor of the museum, they can see into a light-filled, airy space featuring two large cycads in planters in front of windows, and a central large dragon tree with multiple staghorn ferns growing on its branches. Orchids, bromeliads, ferns, and mosses are displayed in planters below the windows.

A text panel depicts the U.S. National Seed Strategy for Rehabilitation and Restoration as a case study that illustrates the positive aspects of dispersing native seeds to restore and rehabilitate lands damaged by hurricanes, fires, and floods. Mounted on the text display panel are eight vials of native seeds showcasing a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors.

The exhibit was made possible by the work of the exhibit core team: Gary Krupnick, Eric Schuettpelz, and Kenneth Wurdack from the Department of Botany, Samantha Barry from the Office of Education and Outreach, and Lauren Kibbe, Mike Lawrence, Laura Donnelly-Smith, and Ally Silberkleit from the Office of Exhibits. Alex Thompson and Melanie Pyle of Smithsonian Gardens selected and will nurture the plants. Additional expertise was provided by Junko Chinen, Stoy Popovich, Jonathan Zastrow, Sherod Mangum, David Hsu, Natalie Rey, Kevin Moyers, and Elizabeth Musteen.

A Successful Expedition Signifies the Palau Orchid Conservation Initiative is Officially Underway

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 2018.

By Benjamin J. Crain

The Palau Orchid Conservation Initiative is a collaborative program that focuses on the biology, ecology, conservation, and restoration of orchids and their associated fungi. The program was launched by the North American Orchid Conservation Center (NAOCC), a coalition of organizations established by the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), the National Museum of Natural History’s Department of Botany and the U.S. Botanic Garden, along with the U.S. Forest Service’s Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry and researchers from Illinois College and the University of Hawaii. The program aims to improve our understanding of orchid communities, their biology, and distribution across Palau while acquiring detailed information on their co-occurrence with specific tree species, vegetation types, soil types, and habitats. The program also aims to explore the diversity of mycorrhizal fungi associated with orchids in Palau to determine how these symbiotic partners influence the diversity, distribution, and abundance of orchid species there.

Taki Falls in Ngrardmau State, Babeldaob, Palau. Several terrestrial and epiphytic orchids were documented at this site. The trail leading to the waterfall is steep and passes through several distinct habitats that support a variety of orchid species. (photo by Benjamin J. Crain)

As a post-doctoral ecologist with NAOCC, I embarked on a two-month collecting expedition in September to document orchid and mycorrhizal diversity in Palau. Through the Palau Orchid Conservation Initiative, the research team aims to improve understanding of biodiversity while helping to sustain it amidst the growing threat of environmental change.

The Republic of Palau is an archipelago of tropical islands in the Pacific and a significant component of the Polynesia-Micronesia global biodiversity hotspot. Palauan islands are generally of two types. Babeldaob, the largest island of Palau is of volcanic origin and somewhat mountainous. The remaining islands, including the famed Rock Islands that are designated as a World Heritage Site, are composed of raised limestone with karst topography, although some persist as low coral atolls. The unique position of these islands between the Philippines and New Guinea results in a flora that is influenced by each of these regions.

Collecting tissue samples and preparing specimens for pressing, drying, and mounting with reserve staff at the Ngardok Nature Reserve ranger station. (photo by Benjamin J. Crain)

Substantial orchid diversity in Palau has been documented during past expeditions of researchers including Noriaki Fukuyama, Ray Fosberg, Agnes Rinehart, and Joan Canfield. The sizable collection of orchid specimens from Palau housed at the U.S. National Herbarium as well as records from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, New York Botanical Garden, Oakes Ames Orchid Herbarium, and Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle proved critical in compiling a checklist of close to 100 orchid species collected on the islands. Despite the known diversity of orchids in Palau, a number of areas have yet to be surveyed and most areas that have been surveyed have not been visited in many years.

Plants and Pollinator Health are Focus of NAPPC 2017 Conference

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 2018.

On October 18 and 19, the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC) held its 17^th annual conference, hosted at the American Farm Bureau Federation in Washington, D.C. The meeting highlighted past accomplishments of NAPPC while the collaborative efforts of many people from all over North America worked tirelessly to work in conjunction to promote the health of all pollinators and their native plants.

This year’s conference included diverse presentations from experts at the forefront of pollinator issues. Topics ranged from the Endangered Species Act and the listing of Bombus affinis, to the importance of state apiarists, improvements in Canadian agriculture, pesticide issues, and the Million Pollinator Garden Challenge.

NAPPC convened nine task forces that established yearlong objectives on specific pollinator issues. One task force is working to implement roadside habitat incentives including educational outreach and recognition of best practices. The Monarch task force will focus on engaging broad stakeholders to promote the health of monarch butterfly populations. Gary Krupnick (Smithsonian’s Department of Botany) co-chaired a task force that focused on selecting plants for pollinators, defining plant material needs in context by looking at pollinator plants and determining best management practices.

An optional field trip to the National Museum of Natural History preceded the conference on October 17. Organized by Krupnick, the field trip included behind-the-scene tours of a number of museum research departments and its collections, including the Departments of Entomology (bees and butterflies), Vertebrate Zoology (birds), Botany, Anthropology, and Mineral Sciences. In addition, a guided tour of Smithsonian Gardens’ Pollinator Garden gave insight into the best practices in establishing a garden that showcases natural plant/pollinator partnerships.

Wind Dispersal for the Win: New Fern Collections from the Marquesas Islands

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 2018.

By Eric Schuettpelz

Typical fern spores are less than one tenth of a millimeter in diameter and are readily carried to far off places by the wind. Having such small propagules certainly contributes to the disproportionate diversity of these plants on oceanic islands. Although ferns and lycophytes (collectively pteridophytes) only account for about 4 percent of the world’s vascular plant species, they can easily represent 20 percent of the species on islands. Generally speaking, the more isolated the island, the more disproportionate the contribution of pteridophytes.

A young leaf of Cranfillia vulcanica. (photo by Ken Wood)

Located in the southern Pacific, about 5000 km from North America and more than 7000 km from Australia, the Marquesas Islands are farther from a continental land mass than any other archipelago. The constituent islands are well separated from the rest of French Polynesia and about 1400 km from Tahiti and the rest of the Society Islands. The 12 major Marquesas Islands are nearly all volcanic in origin, ranging in age from about 1 to 6 million years old. In total, the archipelago accounts for about 1050 km² of land area, which is roughly the same as the city of Los Angeles or the island of Tahiti and less than the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i. Three of the islands reach an elevation exceeding 1200 m.

A comprehensive flora of the Marquesas Islands has yet to be published. However, researchers based at the National Tropical Botanical Garden (led by David Lorence), the Smithsonian Institution (led by Warren Wagner), and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (led by Jacques Florence) have been studying the plants inhabiting this archipelago for more than three decades. Much of their progress has been tracked on the Flora of the Marquesas website and this information is currently being developed into a two volume Flora of the Marquesas Islands to be published in late 2018. At present, 329 native vascular plant species are listed. Remarkably, ferns and lycophytes account for 99 (30 percent) of these. There are very few islands or archipelagos with proportions that are more skewed toward pteridophytes.

Poumaka, a prominent 500 m tall spire on Ua Pou. (photo by Ken Wood)

As a first step toward understanding the origins of this incredible pteridophyte diversity, I recently traveled to the Marquesas Islands, with funding from the Global Genome Initiative and the National Science Foundation, to collect herbarium specimens and silica-dried material for DNA extraction. I was joined by Ken Wood (National Tropical Botanical Garden) and Jean-François Butaud (Consultant in Forestry and Polynesian Botany).

Conservation Biologists Find Reasons for Optimism

From Plant Press, Vol. 20, No. 4, October 2017.

-By Kayleigh Walters

Sometimes it feels like everything is bad news. Everything that is wrong with the world can hover in the background of our thoughts like a heavy storm cloud. In the recent paper, “Earth Optimism: Success Stories in Plant Conservation,” Gary Krupnick (Department of Botany) and Nancy Knowlton (Department of Invertebrate Zoology) inform us that not only is this focus self-defeating, but it is often incorrect. Conservation biology has seen repeated successes through sustained hard work and focus. The paper was published in the Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden (102: 331-340; 2017).

The field of conservation biology is suffering from a focus problem; it is one of the only scientific discipline in which loss and the negative is so heavily focused on. While it is important not to be blindly optimistic, the media and educational material primarily highlight habitat destruction and loss, rather than discoveries of new plants or conservation successes. Many experts are even unaware or simply uninterested in stories of positive progress, leading to fewer encouraging stories being published. This contributes to people's perception of an unending, insurmountable problem where their actions have little impact. Rather than forwarding an outlook of despair, we need to see stories of successful actions and exciting discoveries.

Signs of optimism: Cyanea pinnatifida, federally listed as endangered and once extinct in the wild, currently has hundreds of seedlings propagated and planted within its historical range on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. (photo by W.L. Wagner)

The Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) acknowledged this issue, and came up with a plan. This document, originally adopted in 2002 and extended through 2020, includes 16 goal-oriented targets specifically established for the survival and preservation of the world's plant biodiversity. In support of this, Krupnick and Knowlton argue for a four-pronged approach to including more stories of optimism into public outreach and education. They are discovering species, saving species, protecting spaces, and restoring habitats. Hearteningly, there are more examples of stories from each of these categories than there is room in this short summary. With technological advancement, we are now closer than we have ever been to a complete database of all world plants. The development of image recognition software for identifying new species will also help in discovering new species.

Success in saving species is also an important area of focus. While people and organizations have been working to delist species from the Endangered Species Act through recovery, many areas around the world have developed programs to reestablish rare and endangered plants. One such area is Hawaii where a local program has taken recovery actions for 148 plant species. A specific example is the Argyroxiphium sandwicense subsp. sandwicense, the Big Island silversword, which went from 15 individuals in the wild to 13,600 on Mauna Kea alone after intervention.