The Plant Press

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).

Specimen Digitization Update [Video]

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2016.

Sylvia Orli and Laurence Dorr (fourth and fifth from left) give Smithsonian Institution’s Secretary Skorton (seventh from left) a tour of the Department of Botany’s digitization conveyor project. (photo by Ingrid Lin)

The Botany Department’s digitization conveyor project continues to run full speed ahead. The pteridophytes (ferns and fern allies) were completely imaged in mid-March, totaling 254,442 fern specimens processed through the conveyor. The project continues with Asteraceae and is currently moving at a rate of 3,000 - 4,000 specimens imaged and processed per day. Over 311,000 botanical specimens have been digitized. In addition, through Picturae (the Dutch-based digitization company), more than 100,000 labels from the digitized botanical specimens have been transcribed and are ready to import to the museum’s specimen data catalog.

Additional funds provided by Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office (DPO) will allow the Botany Department to complete the entire Asteraceae family by Fall 2016 and then begin other families. The goal is to find funding to completely digitize the 4.5 million specimens in the U.S. National Herbarium – a lofty goal, indeed, but well worth the effort. The botanical specimens have many stories to tell, and with open access to the data and images, the collections can be queried and analyzed in ways not previously possible.

See a video about the digitization project after the jump...

Conveying Specimen Value through Digitization

From Plant Press, Vol. 19, No. 1, January 2016.

By Elizabeth Jacobsen and Gary A. Krupnick

The United States National Herbarium (Herbarium Code: US) has always been about sharing. Initially, the “diffusion of knowledge” was achieved primarily by publishing articles, hosting visitors, and sending out specimen loans. Now, the Department of Botany is taking sharing to a new level by digitizing a significant portion of the collection’s 5 million specimens using conveyor belt technology contracted from Picturae, a European company that specializes in digitization. Using this new technology, the herbarium has begun the task of imaging specimens at an average rate of about 4,000 specimens per day. The plan is to create an image for half a million plant specimens in 6 to 8 months. This rapid digitization project, which began in October 2015 with the evening primrose family (Onagraceae), is now well into the ferns, and will eventually continue with the sunflower family (Asteraceae).

The timing of the project is no coincidence, according to Sylvia Orli, IT Manager and Webmaster for the Department of Botany. The digitization project “follows rapid and amazing advances in computer technology,” she explains, with the U.S. National Herbarium joining a worldwide digitization effort that is particularly well-liked among herbaria. The once insurmountable task of making millions of specimens accessible is suddenly feasible. The herbarium digitization project, using conveyor-based technology to image natural history collections, is the first of its kind for a herbarium in the United States, and the second conveyor-based project at the Smithsonian (following the digitization of the National Museum of American History's National Numismatics Collection).

The U.S. National Herbarium has been working towards the goal of complete collection digitization for a long time. “We have always looked out for opportunities to digitize,” reports Orli, even if those opportunities involved the laborious process of punching holes into a paper card and keying them into a computer, as was done in the 1970s.

An inventory of the Type Collection was initiated in the 1970s to make this portion of the collection easier to use. Over the course of almost 50 years, the herbarium has built a digital inventory of around 1.5 million specimens, representing more than a third of the pressed specimens in the herbarium. Using rapid digitization approaches, the entire collection could be completed in under 10 years.

Read more and watch the video “Smithsonian X Digitization: A conveyor-belt driven imaging system” below the fold.

Special Agents Seek Change

From Plant Press, Vol. 18, No. 1, January 2015.

By Gary A. Krupnick

The National Tropical Botanical Garden and the Department of Botany at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History presented a one-day symposium titled, “Agents of Change: Botanic Gardens in the 21^st Century” on October 7, 2014, in Washington, DC. The symposium brought together the world's leading scientists, researchers, and garden leaders to share the most pressing issues, trends, and solutions at botanical gardens, to the challenges faced by the natural environment, the struggles to feed the hungry, and the losses of cultural diversity.

The symposium was structured around four over-arching topics: (1) Extinction or survival: conserving plants in a changing world; (2) Feast or famine: how we can and will feed 9 billion people; (3) Biocultural conservation: interpreting the richness of the human experience; and (4) Operational sustainability: are botanic gardens an endangered species? Each topic featured three to four guest speakers and was followed by an expert panel with five leaders in botany.

The Third Time’s the Charm

From Plant Press, Vol. 17, No. 3, July 2014.

By L.J. Dorr

Puya raimondii Harms (Bromeliaceae) is now in flower in the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley. This is only the third flowering event for this species in cultivation—all three events occurring in California. It flowered before in Berkeley in 1986 and there was a “smaller” flowering event at the San Francisco Botanical Garden inside Golden Gate Park in 2006. What connects the current flowering event to our department is the fact that I was one of the collectors of the seed that produced the plant that is now in flower. The collection was made almost a quarter of a century ago near Comanche, 80 km southwest of La Paz, Bolivia.

Continue reading about the "Queen of the Andes" and watch a video from the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley below the fold...

Allies in Plant Conservation Sign MOU

From Plant Press, Vol. 17, No. 3, July 2014.

By Warren L. Wagner

A memorandum of understanding (MOU) is often signed to define relationships among agencies and institutions. On June 30, the Smithsonian Institution joined 11 federal agencies in signing a MOU that continues the work of the Federal Native Plant Conservation Committee of the Plant Conservation Alliance (PCA) and its cooperators in State government and non-government organizations. The PCA is a public-private partnership of governments and non-government organizations that share the same goal of protecting native plants by ensuring that native plant populations and their communities are maintained, enhanced, and restored.

Attendees who form the Federal Native Plant Conservation Committee of the Plant Conservation Alliance meet at the 2014 Seed Conference to sign a MOU and renew their commitment to native plant conservation. (photo by Tami Heilemann, DOI)

“Every year America suffers significant losses of its native plants and wildlife due to fire, drought, flood and other natural disaster damage,” Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Director Neil Kornze said. “The MOU we are signing today calls attention to our need as Federal agencies to adapt to changing realities and to work together to restore affected landscapes for the people, communities and economies that depend on them.”

A video from NatureServe about the Plant Conservation Alliance and the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding is available below the fold.

 

Ancient Algal ‘Tree Rings’ Show Dramatic Decline in Arctic and Sub-Arctic Sea Ice

From Plant Press Vol. 17 no. 1, January 2014.

An ancient new player has entered the debate over global warming and it is pink.

Labrador fishermen call them “red rocks” because underwater they resemble odd-shaped pastry topped with thick pink frosting. The color is the living algae Clathromorphum compactum and the hard rocklike material on which it sits are layers of calcified crusts the algae deposit year after year. They grow in shallow water (49 to 55 feet deep) and are widely distributed in the Arctic and sub-Arctic Oceans.

Now, scientists from the University of Toronto, the Smithsonian Institution and other research organizations have discovered how to use these crusty layers to track changes in Arctic sea ice over centuries, says Jochen Halfar, an associate professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences. Halfar is co-author of a paper printed in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reporting that this newly tapped ‘archive’ shows a dramatic decrease in ice cover during the last 150 years.

Read more and watch the video "Treasure of the Subarctic" AFTER THE BREAK

Departmental Titan Arum Blooms

From Plant Press Vol. 16 no. 4, October 2013

While more common than they used to be, a flowering Amorphophallus titanum (titan arum) is still a treat. In early August one of these large aroids decided to put on its irregular, smelly show for the first time since 2007. Inconveniently, it bloomed during the weekend, and the Botany Greenhouses, located in Suitland, Maryland, is only opened to staff. Still, a short open house accommodating about 35 visitors took place.

This particular specimen was given to the Smithsonian Institution’s Botany Greenhouse in 2003 by now-retired Aroid curator Dan Nicolson. Dan attended the open house with his wife Alice Nicolson and son David.

Before modern transportation and easy shipping of plant materials between conservatories and collectors, the titan arum was very rare outside its Sumatran rain forest. Now much more common in cultivation, its irregular flowering times, large inflorescence and foul odor still create a fascinating burst of fecundity. Amorphophallus titanum has the largest known unbranched inflorescence in the plant kingdom, and this time the Botany Department’s plant grew to a respectable 52 inches tall. Though its width and odor peaked in the middle of the night, SI Photographic Services was kind enough to photograph the event Saturday through Monday morning, where the overnight maximum can be seen in a stop motion video.

Unseen by visitors, the spadix itself warms up above ambient temperature to help dissipate the odor of rotting flesh, bringing in hopeful carrion beetles (in Sumatra) and flies (in our area). The Smithsonian Office of Facilities Engineering and Operations supplied the infrared images to show the warming spadix.

Because an individual plant requires a substantial amount of energy to produce such a large inflorescence, it can be many years before the Botany Department has another one of these fleeting events in the research greenhouses. Seeing titan arum bloom is highly recommended, here or elsewhere.

See the infrared image and the stop motion video after the jump...