The Plant Press

Staff activities [Videos]

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

In September 2022, Sylvia Orli participated in the BioDigiCon, a recently rebranded iDigBio summit focusing on digitization and mobilization within the natural history collections. She gave a lightning talk, "A Fully Digitized Herbarium - Workflows to Keep Up 100%," with Ingrid Lin (Botany) and Nathan Anderson (Smithsonian Digitization Program Office) describing the US Herbarium efforts to maintain a fully digitized status for the herbarium's ever growing collection. In addition, in her detail capacity as Digitization Coordinator for NMNH, she participated in the workshop, "Digitization Coordination: Combining Project Management & Digitization Efforts to Benefit Collections, Big and Small," which explored the concept of a centralized digitization program in natural history institutions. The BioDigiCon occurs annually to bring together the global natural history collections communities to discuss digitization topics.

Sylvia Orli’s BioDigiCon lightning talk, "A Fully Digitized Herbarium - Workflows to Keep Up 100%":

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At a request from Jennifer Brundage (Smithsonian Affiliations), Alice Tangerini traveled to Northfield, Vermont on November 8-10, 2022, to present a lecture and display artwork at the Sullivan Museum. The Sullivan Museum at Norwich University is the only affiliate partner in the Northeast and had a current exhibition on one of their alumni, William Brenton Boggs. Boggs was on the North Pacific Exploring and Surveying Expedition and the U.S. National Herbarium has collections from that expedition. Tangerini’s talk, “Botanical Illustration, Then and Now,” included a history of illustration in publications mentioning the changes in media used and a synopsis of collecting specimens for herbaria, preparation of herbarium specimens, and illustration techniques. She included the story of the series of cactus illustrations made for the Whipple Pacific Railroad Survey of 1854 and how they were discovered in the herbarium. She emphasized the importance of keeping records of illustrations and how they add to our history in the sciences. The talk was well attended with an overflow in another room and recorded for later viewing. Tangerini brought full size copies of illustrations to the lecture and was able to have a small display of the Department of Botany’s Art Collection.

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On December 1, 2022, Gary Krupnick gave an invited webinar, "A Natural History Approach to Protecting Pollinators" for the Let's Talk Gardens webinar series hosted by Smithsonian Gardens. Pollinators are critical to environmental health, our nation’s economy, and our food security. But many pollinators are in serious decline. Krupnick's presentation provided insight into the natural history of plant-pollinator interactions and how biologists, gardeners, and community scientists can help protect plants and their pollinators. 

Gary Krupnick’s Let's Talk Gardens webinar, "A Natural History Approach to Protecting Pollinators":

Pollinators take spotlight at the NAPPC 2022 Conference [Video]

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

The 22^nd Annual International Conference of the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC) was held at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) on 18-20 October 2022. NAPPC's mission is to encourage the health of resident and migratory pollinating animals and the plants they service in North America. Co-hosted by Pollinator Partnership, the meeting brought together NAPPC partners in-person and virtually from throughout North America and beyond.

The NAPPC Conference included keynote speakers, member updates, research reports, and task force breakout sessions. Task Forces are cross-discipline, short-term, project-oriented groupings designed to accomplish specific tasks. Since 1997, the 170+ members of NAPPC have made advancements for pollinators, people, and the planet.

Hawaii Rare Plant Genetics Workshop advances conservation research [Video]

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

By Warren Wagner & Gary Krupnick

The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) co-hosted a Hawaii Rare Plant Genetics Workshop from October 2021 to March 2022, featuring 32 speakers over the course of 10 virtual sessions. From those recorded sessions, 19 presentations are now publicly available for viewing as a playlist on NMNH’s Natural History for Scientists’ YouTube channel.

The goals of the 10-day workshop were to better understand how the latest molecular research, especially in the field of genomics, can benefit the ongoing challenges in plant conservation in Hawaii, and to determine when and how to incorporate molecular techniques into species recovery and management. Discussions centered around identifying particular techniques and methods most appropriate for a variety of questions and challenges regularly faced by field biologists in preventing species extinctions. One outcome of the workshop is that the workshop organizers are developing a decision tree for when and how best to utilize molecular techniques in plant conservation practices in Hawaii, and are creating a prioritization scheme that will allow field biologists to prioritize resources in funding and carrying out the highest priority research.

The workshop was part of a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded collaborative project headed by Ann Sakai and Steve Weller (University of California, Irvine), Michael Moore (Oberlin College), Norm Wickett (Chicago Botanic Garden), and Warren Wagner (NMNH via National Tropical Botanical Garden) to capitalize on recent advances in molecular methods for the study of evolution and to allow for considerable enhanced detail of the evolution and conservation of Schiedea, one of the largest Hawaiian endemic lineages in the carnation family, Caryophyllaceae.

The central research goal of the funded proposal is to resolve the evolution of breeding systems in Schiedea, an extraordinarily diverse Hawaiian endemic lineage that serves as a natural laboratory of plant reproductive evolution, using a variety of field- and sequencing-based techniques. Schiedea is one of the most spectacularly diverse clades in any island plant group with respect to pollination and breeding systems, varying from insect to wind-pollinated species, hermaphroditic to dioecious breeding systems, and outcrossing to selfing mating systems.

Flowers of Schiedea have evolved a variety of ways to present nectar. Schiedea is the focal genus of an NSF-funded project employing a suite of high-throughput sequencing tools to better resolve the phylogeny and enhance understanding of trait evolution, especially related to breeding system diversity, which is among the highest exhibited in any island plant lineage. Schiedea has a unique nectary structure where each one has a shaft-like tubular extension that develops to varying extents. This nectary shaft is thin and translucent. Nectar fills the shaft and is extruded from the tip as a drop in species with elongate nectar shafts (A, S. lydgatei) or it forms in a pool on the surface of the sepal in species with recurved nectaries (B, S. verticillata). In the species likely bird pollinated the nectary is enlarged forming a nearly contiguous ring of nectariferous tissue. The abaxial margin of each nectary has a flap-like extension rather than a shaft. The black nectar produced in these species is usually copious and hexose-rich (C, S. obovata). Nectaries tend to be reduced in size in wind-pollinated species (D, S. adamantis). Figure reproduced from Wagner, et al. (2005). Images taken in the greenhouse of the University of California at Irvine; A, C, and D taken by Nobumitsu Kawakubo; B taken by W.L. Wagner.

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.”

Botanical data for all: The U.S. National Herbarium is digitized! [Video]

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

By Sylvia Orli and Julia Beros.

The breadth of collections held at the U.S. National Herbarium (USNH) document the incredible biodiversity and botanical heritage on our planet and serve as the backbone of our work. In service to the public and as the foundation for research, these collections, as they exist now and grow, are at the core of our mission and purpose as an institution. Making these assets available, in physical and digital form, is a fundamental part of fulfilling our responsibility. The USNH is one of the world’s largest and most diverse botanical collections, accounting for nearly 5 million specimens, the digitization of which fulfills our goal to make specimen data and images discoverable and accessible to all.

Since 2015, the Department of Botany and the Smithsonian Digitization Program Office (DPO) have embarked on a joint project to digitize all pressed and packeted plant specimens, which comprise the great majority of our collections. Collaborating with the contracted digitization company Picturae, based in the Netherlands, we have employed a conveyor belt system and a high-throughput approach to realize this ambition. This approach to digitization provides high resolution images and transcriptions of label data for each specimen. These assets are ported to our data catalog and subsequently aggregated with global collections data from other herbaria. By these means, the digitization of the USNH has a huge impact on botanical research throughout the world—collecting and codifying data that can unexpectedly inform the work of researchers near and far.

Michelangeli receives the 19th Cuatrecasas Medal [Video]

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

The José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany is named in honor of Dr. José Cuatrecasas, a pioneering botanist and taxonomist, who spent nearly a half-century working at the National Museum of Natural History. Cuatrecasas had a distinguished career devoted to systematic botany and plant exploration in tropical South America, especially in the Andes, and this award serves to keep vibrant his accomplishments and memory. The Department of Botany and the U.S. National Herbarium present this award at the Smithsonian Botanical Symposium to a botanist and scholar of international stature who has contributed significantly to advancing the field of tropical botany. The award consists of a bronze medal bearing an image of José Cuatrecasas on the front with the recipient’s name and date of presentation on the back.

This year the 19^th José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany was presented to Fabián Michelangeli.

Fabián Michelangeli accepts the 19th José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany. (photo by Ken Wurdack)

Michelangeli earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology in 1993 from the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas and a Ph.D. in 2000 from Cornell University for research on Tococa, a genius of ant plants in Melastomataceae. Since 2004 he has been a curator in the Institute of Systematic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) where he continues his research on Melastomataceae. With about 177 genera and 5,800 species, Melastomataceae is one of the most easily recognized tropical plant families and the Smithsonian and NYBG have some of the world's best collections due to multiple generations of curator research on the family.

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.

Behind-the-scenes video takes you inside the Botany Digitization Conveyor project [video]

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

A behind-the-scenes video of the Botany Digitization Conveyor project is now available on YouTube  where you can see the conveyor belt in action and hear about the workflows and processes that made the project such a success. After 6 years of digitizing the US National Herbarium, the digitization project is nearly complete. By January 2022, nearly 4 million catalog records of the herbarium’s botanical specimens will have been digitized, each with a high-resolution image. All flowering plants and ferns, lichens, bryophytes, and algae will be represented online (see the online collection portal). 

The behind-the-scenes video was featured during the “Biodiversity Digitization: A Decade of Success” (Biodiversity Digitization 2021 | iDigBio) virtual conference. Co-sponsored by the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), iDigBio, and GBiF, the two-day conference held on September 22 and 23 celebrated the collective successes of mobilization and efforts to digitize the world’s biodiversity data in the US and abroad. Participation by NMNH staff in the conference included six speakers and four virtual tours of the museum’s collections. Over 800 attendees pre-registered for this event.

The virtual conference provided both detailed looks at specific work being done in digitization, as well as a broad outlook on the meaning and significance of digitized collections. The themes for the two-day conference were innovations, community, grand challenges, what’s next, and looking to the future of digitization.

Other behind-the-scenes tours featured at the conference include those of the Entomology Collection, Molluscs Collection, and Cultural Objects. Each video is part of NMNH’s “Natural History for Scientists” YouTube channel.

A behind-the-scenes video of the Botany Digitization Conveyor project features Sylvia Orli and Victor Shields (Picturae) with an introduction by Eric Schuettpelz.

Research & Activities [Video]

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

On May 19, Research Associate John Wiersema presented a webinar entitled, “A Taxonomist’s View on the Essence of Waterlilies that Inspired Claude Monet,” to the membership of Marie Selby Botanical Garden in Sarasota, Florida. In this virtual botanical briefing, Wiersema asked, “What is it about the nature of waterlilies that provided the inspiration for Claude Monet’s gardens and so many of his impressionist paintings?” Wiersema’s webinar examined the role of waterlilies in the aquatic landscape, explored the relationships among the various forms of waterlilies throughout the world, and probed the aesthetic qualities that have made them the ultimate aquatic ornamental. He also spoke about the early history of waterlily hybridization in Europe in relation to the waterlilies available to Monet when Monet established his water garden in Giverny in the late 19th century, with a closer look at those that successfully established on Monet’s estate. Wiersema also finds an appreciation in the sheer beauty and serenity of pristine waterlily settings and a Monet impressionist rendering of it.

In John Wiersema's webinar, "A Taxonomist’s View on the Essence of Waterlilies that Inspired Claude Monet," Wiersema provides a chronology of Monet's paintings and looks closely at the botany behind the artist's inspiration.

Wiersema, a specialist on the taxonomy of the waterlily group, focuses his research on the waterlily genus Nymphaea. He has studied and collected these plants in both temperate and tropical countries on six continents, personally cultivating at least 60 such gatherings for direct observation over the last four decades, and examined thousands of global water lily herbarium specimens. He has discovered and described several new species and has participated in over 30 scientific publications on the group. Retired from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service after more than 30 years, he now serves as a Research Associate in the Botany Department of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Wiersema gained global standing as a specialist in plant nomenclature, and now has direct editorial involvement with both the botanical and cultivated plant codes of international nomenclature and the international journal Taxon. Over his professional career, he has contributed to some 125 scientific publications.

The presentation is available online at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxlJQwp0N-U>.

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.