Herbarium affiliates Wayne Lampa, Scott Kobal, Carol Kobal and Pat Armstrong have assembled a guide to the common mosses of The Morton Arboretum. This represents decades of work on the flora of the region, with a focus on mosses in the past two decades.
Download it today! You can get the moss guide at our lab website (herbarium page), and you can see a sample of Wayne’s excellent collections on the CNABH Bryophyte Portal.
A new paper from our Ware Field experimental prairie demonstrates that both seed and plug plantings maintain phylogenetic and functional diversity over time. As seeding is generally more cost-effective for prairie restoration, we recommend focusing on seeding, except where managers require immediate plant cover, or for species difficult to establish from seed.
Barak, R.S., Karimi, N., Glasenhardt, M.-C., Larkin, D.J., Williams, E.W. and Hipp, A.L. (2022), Phylogenetically and functionally diverse species mixes beget diverse experimental prairies, whether from seeds or plugs. Restoration Ecology e13737. https://doi.org/10.1111/rec.13737
Mira Garner and Leah Samuels (Herbarium and Plant Systematics Lab) collected leaf tissue from their 55th and final site this past week for the NSF-funded Dimensions of Biodiversity oak syngameon study that the Arboretum is leading. They collected 530 specimens this summer representing ten species, covering essentially the entire range of bur oak (the red points on the map below show their collection sites). Great work, Mira and Leah!
Graduate student Sofía Zorrilla-Azcué (UNAM, Morelia) is at the Arboretum for a four-month stay in the Herbarium and Systematics Laboratory. She will be analyzing data from a reduced-representation genomic study (using RAD-seq) into the effects of environment on allele frequency in Quercus insignis, in collaboration with Andrew Hipp and her advisor and Systematics Lab collaborator Hernando Rodríguez Correa.
The NSF-funded Ware Field experimental prairie was featured in a paper published this week in Applications in Plant Sciences. The study, “Application of remote sensing technology to estimate productivity and assess phylogenetic heritability,” illustrates the use of drone technology to investigate plant productivity in a diverse (127-species) grassland, and ties the evolution of plant traits to differences among experimental plots in biomass and drone-measured productivity measures. It demonstrates that (1) the traits that shape productivity in our prairie experiment are largely convergent across the tree of life, making the phylogenetic effect of species assemblages on restoration outcomes a complex outcome of descent and modification (Darwin might have predicted that…); and (2) drone-based measures are pretty efficient at capturing biomass: nearly 50% of the among-plot variation in biomass was predicted from drone measures.
The paper was moreover a great Arboretum team effort, led by former RA Lane Scher (now at Duke University) and the PI for the project, Andrew Hipp. Drone based remote-sensing data were collected and analyzed by Scher, with support from Chuck Cannon, the CTS director. Biomass for the project was collected by undergraduate research intern Ashley Tuffin during a 9-month international research internship in the Herbarium and Systematics Laboratory, with support from RA Mary-Claire Glasenhardt. Data analyses were conducted by Scher, Hipp and Tuffin, then data were reanalyzed by Herbarium / Systeamtics postdoc Nisa Karimi, who helped in framing the manuscript. Former Soil Ecologist Bryant Scharenbroch analyzed the soils data and worked with Hipp and Glasenhardt in designing the prairie experiment. It nicely illustrates CTS’s broad range of strengths in both research and mentorship. https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aps3.11401