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.
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