Charles Zimmerman is Herbarium Collections and Outreach Administrator for the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium at The New York Botanical Garden.
CALLING ALL ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDS AND CITIZEN SCIENTISTS!
For centuries, biologists have explored and documented the natural world, collecting the billions of specimens now stored in museums, universities, and field stations worldwide. In the past few years, The New York Botanical Garden and other institutions across the globe have made tremendous strides toward unleashing the treasure trove of information stored in these collections for researchers and the general public.
Now, there is a way you can help!
On Saturday, October 22nd, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., The New York Botanical Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium will partner with Fordham University to host a community-based Natural History Collection Bioblitz as part of WeDigBio 2016, a global four-day volunteering event focused on mobilizing biodiversity data from preserved museum specimens to advance scientific research.
Colette Berg, an intern in the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium at The New York Botanical Garden, recently graduated from Fordham University, where she studied environmental science. In January, she will begin a Master’s in Biology program at Southeast Missouri University, focusing on plant ecology.
Operation Crossroads commanding officer Vice Admiral William Blandy and his wife slice into an Operation Crossroads cake following the first Bikini Atoll nuclear tests in 1946.
Every day as an intern at the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, I transcribe the labels on pressed plant specimens so data about the specimens can be made accessible online. As I type out the collector’s name, date of collection, and location, I catch a glimpse of the stories behind the specimens—stories of science and politics and history.
Recently, one particular label caught my eye. In 1946, William Randolph Taylor, a University of Michigan botanist who specialized in algae, traveled to the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific with Operation Crossroads, a military mission to test atomic bombs at the remote Bikini Atoll. Taylor’s 1990 obituary described him as a man who “worked in the years of brass-fitted monocular microscopes” and “entered the sea in long rubber boots while holding a glass-bottomed bucket.” Before the bombs were detonated, Taylor surveyed the vegetation on the island. One can imagine him peering through his bucket in the surf as he collected some of the specimens shown here.
As if assembling a comprehensive, scientifically verified database of more than 350,000 plant species were not a daunting task to begin with, try doing it in only four years. That’s the ambitious goal the scientists working on World Flora Online (WFO) are racing to meet.
When it’s up and running, WFO will provide scientists, conservationists, political leaders, and other policy-makers with information they need to protect one of Earth’s most important resources—its plants.
More than two dozen of the world’s leading plant scientists gathered at The New York Botanical Garden recently to review the progress that has been made on WFO and to plan the way forward so they can meet the goal of completing the database in 2020, which was established in the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international agreement.
As part of a week-long series of meetings at the Botanical Garden, several of the participants spoke about specific aspects of this monumental project during a symposium on Wednesday, April 27, in the Garden’s Ross Hall.
The presentations began with introductory remarks by Barbara M. Thiers, Ph.D., the Garden’s Vice President for Science Administration and the Patricia K. Holmgren Director of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium. She noted that the Garden is one of four leading botanical institutions that are working together to coordinate the efforts of scientists and institutions around the world to create this first-of-its-kind online resource.
Setting out, uphill, from Gatthu village on the first day of the trek
Last fall, when the leaves were turning golden yellow and bright red in The New York Botanical Garden’s old-growth forest, two Botanical Garden scientists were on the other side of the world, trekking through a very different old-growth forest in northern Myanmar.
Douglas C. Daly, Ph.D., is the Director of the Institute of Systematic Botany and the B. A. Krukoff Curator of Amazonian Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Among his research activities, he is a specialist in the Burseraceae (frankincense and myrrh) family of plants.
During this 2007 expedition on Brazil’s Rio Japiim, researchers collected a plant that was recently identified as a new discovery for that country.
Brazil, welcome to the Lepidobotryaceae.
The story of how this oddball plant family was found in Brazil for the first time is a perfect example of what could be called turbo-botany. It combines a tightly connected international network of taxonomic specialists, agile and constantly refreshed databases, a globally comprehensive herbarium, and digital imaging—all hinging on collecting plants in the field and getting the specimens in front of experienced eyes.
The plant at the center of this story was collected during a rapid flora survey of an area that was being considered for conservation as a state reserve in northwestern Acre, a state in western Brazil. Acre was the main geographic focus of my research for 25 years, in collaboration with colleagues at the Federal University of Acre. The project culminated in an analytical catalogue of 4,000 species, the first of its kind in that region. Just as important, it provided training for quite a few young Brazilian botanists.
Maya Jaffe graduated from Florida International University and is currently an intern at the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, where she is working on a project to digitize Thelephora and Agaric mushrooms.
“A handful of qinghao immersed with 2 liters of water, wring out the juice and drink it all.”
That was the recipe prescribed in 340 AD by Chinese alchemist Ge Hong in his A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies as a treatment for malaria (1). For the bulk of human existence, people looked toward the forest and their gardens for remedies for their ailments, just as we now browse the aisles of our local pharmacy. So many of the modern drugs we rely on for our health have botanical precursors. In a way, Ge Hong’s advice still stands today because Quinghao, also known as sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), contains the chemical compound artemisinin, found in most of the leading antimalarial drugs (2).
Artemisia annua is native to Eurasia and is cultivated on a large scale in China and Vietnam. This member of the Asteraceae (the daisy or sunflower family) is a shrub with a single stem that typically reaches a meter in height and has alternating branches with dissected, fern-like leaves and small, yellow flower heads. And, as the label on this 1957 specimen from the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium notes, “herb has medicinal uses.”
Ancient Chinese medicine typically utilizes the above-ground parts of the plant, but now scientists have narrowed their focus to the leaves, from which artemisinin can be extracted easily. Because of its chemical composition, artemisinin is highly unstable when warm and therefore has a short shelf life in hot environments. Because of this and the general expense of extraction, Dr. Jay Keasling at the University of California Berkeley is currently exploring the synthetic production of artemisinin (4).
While appreciating modern technology and scientific advances that allow for the development of synthetic drugs, we should recognize and value the medicinal properties inherent in many plants in their natural state, such as sweet wormwood. One way to do that is with The New York Botanical Garden’s Wild Medicine iPhone app, which explores the medicinal properties of various plants throughout the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory.
Next time you’re out in nature and admiring the flora, try to remember that while the aesthetic beauty of plants is breathtaking, those same plants may be vital to every breath that you take.
Tu, Youyou. The Discovery of Artemisinin (qinghaosu) and Gifts from Chinese Medicine. Nature Medicine17.10 (2011): 1217-220.
White, N. J. “Assessment of the Pharmacodynamic Properties of Antimalarial Drugs in Vivo.”Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. U.S. National Library of Medicine. 1997.
WHO Monograph on Good Agricultural and Collection Practices (GACP) for Artemisia Annua L. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, 2006.
Ro, Dae-Kyun, Eric M. Paradise, Mario Ouellet et al. Production of the Antimalarial Drug Precursor Artemisinic Acid in Engineered Yeast.Nature440.7086 (2006): 940-43.
Ynes Mexia, a Mexican-American botanical collector and explorer who began her career in 1925, became the most accomplished female botanical collector of her time both in terms of the number of plant specimens she collected and the miles she traveled on her expeditions. Although she began in her mid-50s and her career was relatively short, she was able to collect an incredible 145,000 specimens. Of those, 500 were new species, and 50 were named in her honor. The William and Lynda Steere Herbarium is fortunate to have many of her specimens.
Mexia was born on May 24, 1870, in Washington, D.C. There are varying accounts of Mexia’s early life, but it is agreed that it was somewhat tumultuous. When she was very young, her parents divorced. Her father returned to his native Mexico, and her mother moved the family to Texas. She was married twice: her first marriage ended abruptly with her husband’s death, and her second marriage ended in divorce. After her divorce, she moved from Mexico City to San Francisco and became involved in social work. She also became an active member of the Sierra Club, which motivated her to attend the University of California, Berkeley.
Her interest in botanical collecting began in 1922 when she joined an expedition led by E. L. Furlong, a Berkeley paleontologist. She enrolled in a course on flowering plants at the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California, and soon after embarked on her first botanical exploration trip to Mexico with Stanford botanist Roxana Ferris. Once in Mexico, Mexia decided that she could accomplish more on her own and abandoned the group, traveling the country for two years and collecting more than 1,500 specimens. She made three additional expeditions to Mexico and collected throughout South America in remote areas of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. She also collected in Alaska and other areas of the United States.
One of the highlights of her explorations was canoeing the Amazon River from its delta to its source in the Andes, covering nearly 3,000 miles in two and a half years. Her specimens were widely distributed to herbaria throughout the U.S. and Western Europe. In addition to collecting, Mexia wrote articles and gave lectures describing her adventures and travels. She died of lung cancer in 1938.
Credit is due to Nina Floy Bracelin, affectionately known as Bracie, who prepared Mexia’s specimens for herbaria. She worked diligently to label the specimens, sending sets to specialists so their species could be determined and distributing the duplicates. Mexia was said to be more interested in exploration and discovery rather than preparing her specimens, but her legacy lives on through those preserved botanical collections, including those that can be found today in the Steere Herbarium.
This specimen of Saurauia mexiae in the Steere Herbarium was collected by Mexia and named in her honor. It is a “type specimen,” which is a specimen selected to serve as a reference point when a plant species is first named.
Juli Anna Janis worked as an intern with Kenneth G. Karol, Ph.D., Assistant Curator in the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Program for Molecular Systematics, whose specialty is algae.
There are certain things that one expects to see preserved in an herbarium, and these are primarily of a biological nature: plants, fungi, and algae.
Recently, though, while mounting algae that the University of California Berkeley had given to The New York Botanical Garden, I realized that the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium also collects materials that are accidentally archived. The algae specimens from Berkeley arrived still pressed between sheets of newspaper contemporaneous with the specimens.
I have seen algae pressed in envelopes, grocery lists, and ephemera of all sorts, but these newspapers have been the greatest treasure yet: around fifty pages ranging between 1895 and 1970, complete with illustrations, advertisements, and a few historic headlines. Here is a page from the fashion section of the San Francisco Examiner of 4 March 1928:
In another context, these newspapers would have been the archival objects worth preserving–as valuable artifacts of human culture and history—but in an herbarium, they have survived as the storage medium for precious material of a different sort: Chara and Nitella algae specimens.
Juli Anna Janis worked as an intern with Kenneth G. Karol, Ph.D., Assistant Curator in the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Program for Molecular Systematics, whose specialty is algae.
In working with specimens of algae in the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium here at The New York Botanical Garden, I have found that every collector has a different set of priorities for preserving specimens.
Some record every minute detail of the collection on a preprinted label in neat penmanship, and some simply scribble “algae?” on a newspaper clipping. Some prize an aesthetic arrangement on a card engraved with scrolling, and some wad the plant up in an old grocery list.
And then there is Alice B. Lord, who, in 1925, arranged this specimen of Bangia fuscopurpurea to look like a horse.
Her reason for this eccentric arrangement will perhaps always be unknowable, but its effect is certainly memorable.
Barbara Thiers, Vice President for Science Administration, Patricia K. Holmgren Director of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium
One of the most important projects underway at The New York Botanical Garden is the ongoing effort to make the preserved plant specimens in the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium available online. That means more than just taking high-resolution digital images of the plants. It also entails entering all of the information about the specimens, such as where they were collected, when, and by whom, into a searchable database.
Of the 7.4 million specimens now in the Steere Herbarium—the largest in the Western Hemisphere and one of the four largest in the world—Botanical Garden science staff have already digitized more than 2.3 million of them.
Why is this a big deal? Well, as more specimens become available online at the Steere Herbarium and elsewhere, plant scientists and other researchers will be able to compile massive amounts of data about Earth’s plant life for the first time.
The Huffington Post has published a piece by Dr. Barbara Thiers, the Garden’s Vice President for Science Adminstration and the Patricia K. Holmgren Director of the Steere Herbarium, in which she talks about one very important use for this newly available data: gaining a better understanding of the potential impact of climate change on ecosystems.
You can read more about the Garden’s digitization project here.
CALLING ALL ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDS AND CITIZEN SCIENTISTS!
