Preliminary Phylogeny of the Southeastern Azaleas (Rhododendron Subg. Pentanthera)
The familiar deciduous azaleas are a group of approximately 16 closely related species currently recognized within the genus Rhododendron. Most species occur in the southeastern United States, but a number occur in the Pacific Northwest United States, in the Caucasus and in Eastern Asia. These plants, along with many of their evergreen relatives, are frequent targets for hybridization and genetic manipulation and therefore make up a substantial portion of the garden plant trade around the world. Despite this economic importance and general familiarity among botanists and the public, we lack an understanding of evolutionary relationships among the azalea species. The goal of the current project is to estimate evolutionary relationships among these species using molecular data and modern phylogenetic analyses. All named species of southeastern azaleas, as well as outgroup representatives from other Rhododendronand Ericaceae lineages, were included using freshly collected or herbarium materials. Data were chosen from both nuclear and chloroplast genomes, and subjected to different analytical frameworks to assess the preliminary behavior of six gene regions during analysis. Our initial results suggest that increasingly available data are rapidly improving our understanding of the relationships among the deciduous azaleas and revealing patterns of morphological and biogeographical patterns of evolution.
1 Marshall University; 2 Wake Forest University
97 • Alexander Krings1, Bruce K. Kirchoff2, Piyush Agarwal3
A New, Open-Access, Visual Learning Tool to Promote Active Learning: Overview and Experiences With Its Application in Teaching Rare Plant Identification
Research in cognitive psychology over the past decades has established that domain experts (no matter whether physics, mathematics, or plant taxonomy) recognize features and patterns not observed by novices. This understanding has important ramifications for teaching. Studies have shown the importance of developing experiences designed to enhance student recognition of meaningful patterns of information. Field botany trips can be effective learning tools to teach plant identification because they help expose students to the variation in character states requisite for training their minds to recognize features and patterns like domain experts. After all, observational repetition in the field played a key role in field botany experts becoming experts in the first place. However, classroom or homework activities that mimic exposure to variation in the wild can also play an important role in developing expertise. These can even be necessary in cases where field labs are not possible, or where natural variation is not easily demonstrable given time constraints. The teaching of rare plant identification, targeted for aspiring environmental consultants or agency botanists, is one of these cases. We here present an open-access, html/javascript-based visual learning tool that facilitates species recognition through active image sorting exercises and discuss experience employing it at the advanced undergraduate and graduate level. The tool is freely available and is customizable to meet the needs of any activity for which sorting can enhance learning.
1Herbarium, Dept of Plant and Microbial Biology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC; 2 Dept of Biology, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, Greensboro, NC; 3 Dept of Computer Science, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, Greensboro, NC
98 • Judy Redden1, Dwayne Estes2
Austin Peay Goes Digital: Developing an Online Herbarium for the Interior Plateaus Ecoregion
Austin Peay State University Herbarium (APSC) is the second largest herbarium in both Tennessee and the Interior Low Plateaus (ILP) Ecoregion with a strong focus on the flora of Tennessee, north Alabama, and central Kentucky. The mission of APSC is to serve as the primary reference herbarium for the ILP, to maintain a diverse collection of southeastern U.S. plants, and to use the collection to provide integrative training to a new generation of botanists through excellence in teaching, research, and outreach. APSC is in the process of implementing an on-line herbarium (http://nhm.apsu.edu/collections/plants/) to accomplish this mission. The web site makes available high-resolution images, taxonomic information, and locality data for approximately 50,000 specimens. This project implements a SilverBiology solution using a copy stand, camera, bar codes, and appropriate software. To date 20,000 specimens have been imaged and the underlying database contains 7,000 full specimen records. Optical character recognition (OCR) is currently being performed on specimen labels to collect skeletal data for the remaining 43,000 specimens. An overview of our methods and work flow rates is discussed. Preliminary data collected will be used to highlight the diversity of the collection and the relative importance of APSC to conservation and diversity studies within the ILP.
1 Dept for Biology and Center for Excellence in Field Biology, Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN; 2 Austin Peay State Univeristy and Botanical Research Institute of Texas
99 • Devin M. Rodgers, Dwayne Estes
Vascular Flora and Vegetation of the Cumberland Riverscour Ecological System in Daddy’s Creek Gorge, Cumberland County, Tennessee
The Cumberland Riverscour ecological system is a disturbance-prone riparian community found along rocky, high-gradient streams associated with deeply entrenched gorges of the Cumberland Plateau Ecoregion. Frequent high-intensity floods scour rocky riparian zones, retarding the growth of trees and favoring the development of a matrix of warm-season grasses, forbs, shrubs, and emergent wetland plants. Daddy’s Creek in Cumberland and Morgan counties, Tennessee, has significant high-quality riverscour development. This stream system is rich in rare, endemic, and disjunct species, like the narrowly-endemic Cumberland rosemary (Conradina verticillata) and the Ouachita Mountains-disjunct, Cumberland sand reed (Calamovilfa arcuata). This study is designed to: 1) document the vascular flora of riverscour communities along Daddy’s Creek, 2) delineate and characterize the various riverscour vegetation associations, and 3) map populations of rare and invasive species. Four preliminary trips to Daddy’s Creek between June and September 2013 yielded 105 species in 90 genera and 39 families. Rare species found include the aforementioned taxa, a new population of Virginia meadowsweet (Spiraea virginiana), sand goldenrod (Solidago arenicola), an undescribed leatherflower (Clematis sp. nov.), an undescribed aster (Symphyotrichum sp. nov.), and a previously overlooked occurrence of the federally-threatened Little River arrowhead (Sagittaria secundifolia), the last a state record for Tennessee. Several vegetation associations were tentatively identified, including types associated with sand, cobble, boulder, and bedrock substrates; these will be assessed further in 2014 using quantitative plot sampling. We compare our results with findings of other Southeastern riverscour studies, concluding with a discussion of the biogeography of the Cumberland Riverscour ecological system.
Dept of Biology and Center for Excellence for Field Biology, Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN; 2 Botanical Research Institute of Texas, Fort Worth, TX
100 • Lytton John Musselman1, Rebecca R. Bray1, Peter W. Schafran1, W. Carl Taylor2
