{"id":24819,"date":"2018-05-15T09:11:09","date_gmt":"2018-05-15T13:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/college.unc.edu\/?p=24819"},"modified":"2024-07-02T16:55:17","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T16:55:17","slug":"the-flora-files","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=24819","title":{"rendered":"The Flora Files"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Alan
Alan Weakley shows off the storage system at the UNC Herbarium. Founded in 1908 by William Chambers Coker, it resides on the top floor of Coker Hall and is the largest in the Southeast. In 2000, it became part of the North Carolina Botanical Garden. Specimens are kept within folders inside large, green cabinets that litter the various floors of the building. (photo courtesy of Endeavors)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the last 50 years, botanists have discovered more than 500 new species of plants across the Southeast. But it takes decades to actually study and record their existence \u2014 a feat that the UNC Herbarium has been tackling since its inception in 1908.<\/em><\/p>\n

The main floor of Coker Hall looks like many other academic buildings on UNC\u2019s campus: beige, plain, a little disheveled. But head to the first, third, or fourth floors, and you\u2019ll find hallways overflowing with green cabinets \u2014 spillover from the UNC Herbarium<\/a>. Each is packed to the brim with physical specimens of the region\u2019s flora.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was an undergrad at Carolina in the 1970s, the herbarium had already outgrown its space,\u201d UNC Herbarium Director Alan Weakley<\/a> recalls.<\/p>\n

At 110 years old, the UNC Herbarium houses more than 800,000 specimens of plants, algae, and fungi. Managed by the North Carolina Botanical Garden<\/a>, it has become the largest in the Southeast. \u201cIt\u2019s a foundational resource for determining hotspots of biodiversity and where conservation is needed,\u201d Weakley says. \u201cYou can\u2019t conserve what you don\u2019t know exists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thanks to the ancient, diverse landscapes of North Carolina, finding new species of plants isn\u2019t all that difficult. But classifying and naming them is a lot more complicated than one might think. Weakley estimates that the average time from the first collection of a new species to it formally being described is 20 to 30 years.<\/p>\n

While new species are identified regularly, a lot of research goes into vetting them \u2014 taking physical measurements, completing statistical analyses, counting chromosomes, and extracting DNA for sequencing for hundreds of specimens. And these procedures take time, especially since most researchers are simultaneously knee-deep in other projects.<\/p>\n

One recent example is Keever\u2019s onion (Allium keeverae<\/em>) \u2014 a plant that taxonomists once believed was a variation in Cuthbert\u2019s onion (Allium cuthbertii<\/em>), found from South Carolina to Florida. But when Weakley first came across the plant in the 1980s as a botanist for the Natural Heritage Program, instincts told him it was a different species altogether.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt bothered me that these plants didn\u2019t really match Allium cutbertii <\/em>from the deeper South,\u201d he says. \u201cThey were larger and had pink flowers, rather than white. And they were over 100 miles distant from the closest populations of Allium cuthbertii<\/em> and grew in a distinctly different habitat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weakley didn\u2019t get to the fieldwork for this particular species until the last few years, when he, UNC graduate student Derick Poindexter, and undergraduate Parker Williams began analyzing the plant more in-depth. \u201cSome of these plants in the Southeast are really cryptic,\u201d Poindexter explains. Many lack obvious structural differences that help identify them as separate species.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of climate change and human activity, we are in crunch time for biodiversity loss,\u201d he continues.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re living in a triage situation,\u201d Weakley agrees. \u201cWhere should we be putting our effort in a world that is changing very rapidly, a world guaranteed to experience some extinction? All this cataloguing of plants sounds like a dry, dusty, academic process \u2014 but understanding the world around us is not dry or dusty at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

A rare find <\/strong><\/p>\n

While flower color offered the first clue that Keever\u2019s onion may not be the same species as Cuthbert\u2019s onion, other distinctions confirmed Weakley and Poindexter\u2019s suspicions. Both the seed size and structure showed differences, as well as the length of the petals and stalks of the flowers.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of years ago, the standard for deciding whether or not a plant was of a new species revolved around visual differences, according to Weakley. But more modern standards state that there should be proof that it is a separate evolutionary lineage.<\/p>\n

Habitat also plays a role. \u201cCuthbert\u2019s onion grows mainly in dry, acidic, sandy soils \u2014 mostly in the Coastal Plain and longleaf pine Sandhills,\u201d Weakley points out. \u201cKeever\u2019s onion grows in rich soils in thin soil mats around rock outcrops restricted to the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina.\u201d This suggests that Keever\u2019s onion is an isolated, or endemic, species.<\/p>\n

Because Keever\u2019s onion exists in one restricted area of the Brushy Mountains, a remote range within the upper Piedmont spanning just two counties, it has been classified as a rare plant. Within that five-mile radius, though, there are many thousands<\/em> of these plants growing on hard-to-access rocky hillsides. So, while rare and of strong conservation interest, the onion is not critically endangered.<\/p>\n

\"UNC
UNC PhD student Derick Poindexter observes a specimen called Keever\u2019s onion, a new species he and UNC Herbarium Director Alan Weakley recently studied and published information on in the Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas. (photo courtesy of Endeavors)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What\u2019s in a name?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Botanists who identify a new plant species have first rights to name it. \u201cI think a lot of people interested in plants and animals assume that there\u2019s a committee that decides,\u201d Weakley chuckles. \u201cBut it\u2019s really just this messy scientific process: Write a paper defending the hypothesis that it\u2019s a new species, publish it in a journal, and then the scientific community will evaluate it over time and accept it or refute it.\u201d<\/p>\n

A pioneering ecologist, Catherine Keever graduated with a PhD from Duke University during WWII, a time when women were more readily accepted into graduate programs than before. \u201cHer PhD dissertation was actually on one of the granite domes in Alexander County where Keever\u2019s onion grows,\u201d Weakley explains. \u201cShe encountered it and collected it and wrote about it in her papers.\u201d But, at the time, Keever thought the plant was the same species as Cuthbert\u2019s onion.<\/p>\n

When Weakley first suspected Keever\u2019s onion was its own species, he reached out to Keever \u2014 in her 80s at the time \u2014 about visiting its location in the foothills. On May 1, 1989, they drove up to the rocky outcrop and discussed the latest discoveries that had been made in the area since Keever conducted research there in the 1940s.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told her there had been some interest in this onion and that it might prove to be a rare species,\u201d Weakley says. She has since passed away, and Weakley named the plant after her to honor her research career. To guarantee that her\u00a0namesake\u00a0and the other 800,000-plus species of\u00a0the UNC Herbarium live on,\u00a0staff and students\u00a0are working rigorously to permanently preserve them \u2014\u00a0digitally.<\/p>\n

Document and digitize <\/strong><\/p>\n

Documenting the flora of the Southeast sounds like tedious work, but it\u2019s a fundamental component for discerning the entirety of an ecosystem. \u201cWe want to understand as many branches of the tree as we can,\u201d Poindexter says. \u201cBecause when you lose portions of that tree or never recognize them as being there in the first place, it\u2019s hard to make sense of it all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Will the extinction of a plant cause the collapse of an ecosystem? \u201cVery unlikely,\u201d Weakley says. \u201cBut each of these species is a result of a long and complicated history of tens and thousands of millions of years that led to that species being there. That concept of stewardship of the organisms on the earth keeps moving.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Soon, researchers will be able to access and study each other\u2019s specimens. Thanks to a push from the National Science Foundation, staff at the UNC Herbarium and 110 other herbaria across the region are digitizing their collections, which will be made accessible in an online portal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere really is a moral imperative to do this type of research,\u201d Poindexter says. \u201cIt\u2019s idiosyncratic but very exciting \u2014 we\u2019re contributing in an innovative way to the rest of the community.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Alan Weakley is the director of the UNC Herbarium (a department of the North Carolina Botanical Garden), as well as an adjunct associate professor in both the department of biology and the curriculum in environment and ecology within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences.<\/em><\/p>\n

Derick Poindexter is a PhD student and graduate teaching assistant in the department of biology within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences, and a student assistant for the UNC Herbarium.<\/em><\/p>\n

By Alyssa LaFaro, Endeavors magazine<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the last 50 years, botanists have discovered more than 500 new species of plants across the Southeast. But it takes decades to actually study and record their existence \u2014 a feat that the UNC Herbarium has been tackling since its inception in 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