Trait-based ecology in the Rocky Mountains

--- Daniel Laughlin

I am thrilled to be working in the Botany Department at the University of Wyoming. Kara and I settled into Laramie this summer, and are really loving this small college town that is full of friendly folk and surrounded by native prairie and forested mountain ranges.

My lab studies how plants function to understand where they grow, how they interact, and how they change the world. In other words, we integrate ecophysiology and community ecology to predict community dynamics and restore wild landscapes.

We develop quantitative approaches to understand and predict how plant species and communities respond to global change and test trait-based models that translate ecological processes into statistical frameworks to predict how communities assemble along environmental gradients and how species interact at local scales. We study how traits differ among and within species, how traits influence demographic rates and drive species sorting along environmental gradients, and how traits determine the outcome of species interactions.

The goal for this work is not only to gain a deeper understanding of basic ecological processes, but also to inform the restoration of degraded ecosystems, which is one of the most important applied challenges for ecology. The science of restoration ecology strives to develop general principles to guide the practice of restoring ecosystems. Our long-term goal is to develop empirically-sound trait-based methods to restore urban and wild landscapes.

Alice Stears joined the lab this fall to pursue her Ph.D. in Ecology. Alice is interested in the effects of climate change on native plant communities. She will be asking how phenotypic traits influence species growth and survival rates in response to interannual climatic variation. Yearly variation has always been a feature of western climates, but extreme weather events are becoming the new norm. Alice’s work will determine which phenotypes will win and lose in response to these variable years.

Dr. Löic Chalmandrier will be joining the lab as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Spring semester. Löic will be working on integrating species interactions into the Traitspace model of environmental filtering to improve our predictions of community assembly.

Laughlin Research Lab website: www.plant-traits.net

Departmental webpage: http://www.uwyo.edu/botany/people/faculty/david-laughlin.html

Rocky Mountain Herbarium Ranks Highly in Nation, World

Source: UW Institutional Communications

The University of Wyoming’s Rocky Mountain Herbarium (RM) ranks in the top 2 percent of herbaria in the U.S. and in the world, according to a recent report.  Founded in 1893, the RM, housed within the Department of Botany, contains 1.3 million specimens from around the world.

Friends of the RM was formed in October 2015 to raise awareness of the RM through public events and activities, and to establish a volunteer program to increase the rate of specimen processing.

Since the volunteer program’s start in January 2016, volunteers have logged more than 5,000 hours to help process a backlog of more than 300,000 specimens, says Charmaine Delmatier, volunteer program director. She says more help would be welcomed. “You don’t have to be a botanist to volunteer,” she says. “We train you, and you get to pick your own hours.”

To volunteer, go to the RM on the third floor of the Aven Nelson Building, or call Delmatier or Curator Ernie Nelson at (307) 766-2236.

Entire press release can be access from: UW Herbarium Ranks Highly in Nation, World | News | University of Wyoming

Lander Middle School students learn about non-photosynthetic plants during their visit to UW Botany Department

During the 2015 Wyoming State Science Fair, Botany graduate student and Science Posse Fellow, Nicholas Dowie taught students from Lander Middle School on how plants can survive in the absence of photosynthesis and the lesser known field within botany, fungal biology.

Students learned different features of the nonphotosynthetic plants and examined them both macroscopically and microscopically. These characteristics were then related back to the function of the plant and their reliance on their fungal partners.  Dowie provided an overview of mushroom biology, examples of the vast diversity of edible mushrooms, and how mushrooms can be cultivated.

Botany students trained Lander (Wyoming) Middle School students to measure soil texture

As part of the 2015 Wyoming State Science Fair, Botany graduate students, Christopher Beltz and Caitlin Rottler led one of the enrichment activities where they demonstrated the process of obtaining soil texture to a group of Lander Middle School students.

This activity included both the laboratory and the “feel” method. Students learned how to use a graduated cylinder, hydrometer, and soil sample of a specific mass to determine the percent-by-mass of the sand, silt, and clay. The feel method is commonly used in the field through examining specific features of wet soils in a person’s palms. Soil texture at a given locale is a significant driver of a number of ecosystem functions and can effect which species of plants are able to grow.

UW Botany Researcher’s work on relating circadian clocks and plant traits published in PNAS

Matt Rubin (front), former graduate student and co-author of this paper, in the field

Daily rhythms of gene expression are thought to benefit most organisms by ensuring that biological processes are activated at the optimal time of day. UW Botany professor Dr. Cynthia Weinig and her former graduate student Matt Rubin showed that natural genetic variation at circadian clock genes regulates plant traits of agricultural importance, such as size.  This study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a prestigious multidisciplinary journal, on Jan 20, 2015.

Link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1422242112

Link to Dr. Weinig’s lab: http://www.uwyo.edu/botany/faculty/cynthia-weinig.html

Jason Edwards won the 2014-15 US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) scholarship

Jason Edwards, a Botany/PiE PhD candidate working with Bill Reiners (Botany) and Steve Prager (Geography) won the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) scholarship.  USGIF scholarships are awarded to Graduating high school seniors, undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students "interested in using capabilities of geospatial science, data and technologies to address human security challenges".  Winners are "chosen based on their academic and professional excellence in a field related to the geospatial intelligence tradecraft".

View of the Ethiopian Highlands where Jason is conducting his research

Jason was one of the 5 doctoral students who this award. His research is centered on the national security implications of the response in agricultural regions to changing climate and government policy in the Horn of Africa. The research involves remote sensing, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and python programming. More information about this scholarship program and this year's winners can be found at: http://usgif.org/education/scholarships.

After long day in the field in Ethiopian Highlands, Jason is relaxing in the hut

Jason holds a B.S. in plant biology from the University of Texas at Austin. He served in the Air Force as an airborne Arabic linguist from 1998 to 2004.

Travel grants enable Yao Liu, a Botany student, to travel to University of Wisconsin – Madison to conduct Quaternary research

Yao Liu, PhD student in Botany & the Program in Ecology, in Professor Steve Jackson’s lab, is expanding the search for past novel and disappearing climate states globally and into the deeper past. Climate change can trigger the reshuffling of species into communities with no modern analog. Current work has linked no-analog communities and climates at continental scales.

Yao is assessing the emergence of no-analog communities during warmer-than-present time periods, such as the last-interglacial (the Eemian, ~ 120,000 years ago), to evaluate how no-analog climates and high climate velocities are related to community shuffling.

Areas in red indicate end-21st-century climates with no close analog
in late 20th-century climates. From Williams et al. 2007

Yao Liu received support from the Botany Northen Fellowship and the Shlemon Center Student Travel Grant for traveling to University of Wisconsin – Madison in November 2013. There she collaborated with Dr. John W. (Jack) Williams, who is conducting foundational, high profile research aimed at understanding the relationship between novel climates and no-analog communities.

Dr. Dan Tinker's work highlighted in WyoFile

Dr. Dan Tinker's research on the 1988 Yellowstone fire is highlighted in WyoFile (Sept 9, 2013).

Dr. Dan Tinker (second from left) with his research team

Excerpt from the article:

"Tinker’s work, which includes years of data collection from the park — some of which has already been published — will eventually incorporate the use of a supercomputer to show how forests respond and regenerate after a fire, how the landscape changes over time and how it could burn again. The three-dimensional fire simulations will show how these young forests might burn and how that is different from old forests.

- Kelsey Dayton" 

Read the complete story at: http://wyofile.com/kelsey-dayton/burned-areas-from-1988-yellowstone-fires-aid-research/

To learn more about his research and fellow researchers, visit The Tinker Lab for Forest & Fire Ecology. 

Training at UW leads to faculty positions for two researchers

Zach Gompert (UW Ph.D. 2012, Program in Ecology) and Tom Parchman (postdoctoral research 2008-2013) recently accepted assistant professorships at universities in the western U.S.  Zach was hired as an evolutionary biologist at Utah State University and Tom was hired as a genome biologist at the University of Nevada-Reno.  Both were very successful in their research while in Alex Buerkle's lab in Botany, where they developed their research expertise in computational biology and evolutionary genetics.

Zach (pictured above) plans to continue his research on butterfly evolution in Wyoming and for years to come is likely to be a regular research visitor to the UW-National Park Service Research at AMK Ranch in Grand Teton National Park.

Tom (pictured above) will continue to work on bird-pine coevolution and lodgepole population genetics, as well as population genetics of fish species that are threatened by hybridization with non-native species.

To learn more about the research conducted by Alex Buerkle and his team, please visit his lab's website.

--- Contributed by Dr. Alex Buerkle

Botany graduate student, David Reed, wins the prestigious Outstanding Student Paper Award at the 2012 AGU annual meeting

David Reed, a PhD student in Brent Ewers’ Plant Physiological Ecology lab, won an Outstanding Student Paper Award (OSPA) for his poster titled "Contrasting ecosystem drivers of mass and energy fluxes at upper and lower elevation sagebrush steppe sites" presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2012 annual meeting in San Francisco.

AGU awards OSPAs “to promote, recognize and reward undergraduate, Master’s and PhD students for quality research in the geophysical sciences.” These awards are a “great honor for young scientists at the beginning of their careers.” The AGU annual meeting is one of the largest meetings with more 20,000 scientists and students in attendance and only the 3-5% of the student presenters in each session is awarded an OSPA.

David received his award in the session "Climatic Controls on Net Ecosystem Exchange." Dr. Ewers (Botany Associate Professor), Dr. Pendall (Botany Associate Professor), and Dr. Kwon (former Botany Postdoctoral Research Associate in Ewers lab) were co-authors of this poster.

To learn more about the research conducted by Brent Ewers and his students, please visit the lab's website.

Extraordinary Discovery of an Ice Age Ecosystem near Snowmass Village, Colorado

Dane Miller

Graduate Student MS, UW Botany Department

On, October 14, 2010, Jessie Steel, a machine operator for an excavation company, unearthed bones of a Columbian Mammoth in a reservoir near Snowmass Village, Colorado. The news of the mammoth discovery captivated the locals in the ski resort towns of Snowmass and nearby Aspen. The buzz of the area shifted seemingly overnight from gossip about celebrities, luxury homes, and skiing to talk of an unimaginable world filled with huge animals such as mammoths, mastodons, and sloths that roamed the same landscape. Within days after the initial mammoth bones were unearthed, construction workers continued to find more bones including tusks, limb bones, vertebrae, jaws, and teeth of ice age animals at an astonishing rate. Reports trickled out from the construction site about the unusual preservation of the bones and plant material found in nearly pristine condition—remarkably the plant material still contained its green waxy cuticle.

Denver Post article: "Snowmass tally: 10 mastodons, 4 mammoths, one "once-in-a-lifetime" find"

Dane Miller at the excavation site
(Photo by Mr. Rick Wicker, photographer, Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  Used with permission from DMNS) 

The news of the discovery rapidly spread across Colorado like wildfire. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DMNS) stepped in as the lead research group behind the leadership of Kirk Johnson and Ian Miller (curators of paleontology at the DMNS). Ian, who happens to be my older brother, immediately called me up and told me to clear my calendar for November. He said “Dane, you better start packing, next week we’re going to be excavating mammoths and mastodons.” My brother always seems to call me up when there is either a cool fossil site to excavate or going skiing—he always wants his brothers around. I have worked with my brother for more than 10 years collecting fossil plants in Washington, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. Prior to the Snowmass dig I had worked at the DMNS as a research assistant and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History as a lab manager/curatorial assistant, so it wasn’t as if I was jumping into field work for the first time. I was asked to do several duties on the Snowmass site beyond just collecting bones and plant material: I led volunteers, assisted research scientists, and labeled specimens. My most dangerous job was running alongside the blade of massive D6 bulldozers moving at nearly full speed as I looked for bones coming out of the mud.   

Denver Museum of Nature & Science: Crews race against winter weather ...
Snowmass Sun article: Family affair ...

My first full day on site blew me away. The site was nothing I had imagined or was really prepared for: working alongside massive heavy machinery, running through three to four feet of cold mud, and tripping over fossils literally everywhere. With every pass of the bulldozers, more bones were unearthed as the site shifted from a couple animals to dozens of animals. The site truly was an emergency room, treating the critically injured (those that were badly damaged by the heavy machinery) first, and triaging the rest. No one had any idea how large this story would become, or knew how it would change Snowmass Village, Colorado. We did know we were a part of history, something truly special.

Colorado State Senator's Press Conference will unveil ...

The find that is etched in my mind forever is a mammoth jaw I discovered. I had come around the side of the portapotty, an area the Museum had originally deemed to be void of fossils in the upper clay layer. I was curious to see what the excavator was digging when I noticed a large mammoth jaw sticking out of the clay. I immediately had the operator stop what he was doing, and ran as fast as I could to get a vertebrate paleontologist to verify my discovery. My brother Ian insists that I was possessed by mastodon spirits. This is his only explanation why I was able to find so many bones. Who knows, maybe I was! 

In the spring of 2011, the Denver Museum organized a highly structured field operation to hand dig the bones where the toe of the dam for new reservoir would eventually be placed. In eight weeks of digging, and with the help of nearly 200 Museum volunteers, we dug up nearly 6,000 bones. I had the privilege of leading a team of 10-12 volunteers over the eight weeks, digging, mapping, and collecting bones and plant material. The Museum also brought in 40 scientists who specialize in Pleistocene and Quaternary time to begin bringing all the science together. By mid-spring a team of scientists from the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Lakewood, Colorado, were able to determine radiocarbon dates from a piece of wood as old as 39,500 years. Other dating techniques have constrained the age of the lake between 130,000 to 39,500 years old. 

Why is this site so special?

1. Exceptional preservation: bones, plant material, and cones still intact as if they were deposited yesterday, which is extremely rare in paleontology. 
2. Diversity:  Complete Pleistocene ecosystem: ~ 40 vertebrates and ~ 20 plant species. 
3. Elevation: Paleontological sites at high elevation are very rare. 
4. Time: The site is between 130,000 and 40,000 years old. More than 90,000 years of Pleistocene history are captured in this reservoir, providing a unique opportunity to explore high elevation Rocky Mountains ecosystems. 
5. aDNA: This site may be able to push the limits of aDNA further than ever because of the exceptional preservation.

As a graduate student in the Botany Department at University of Wyoming pursuing a Masters in Botany with Dr. Stephen Jackson, I've been fortunate enough to continue to work on the Snowmass project. My Master’s thesis is focused on the conifer cones and needles collected at the Snowmass site. I will be applying various morphometric techniques, taxonomy, and aDNA molecular analysis to help add to our understanding of Pleistocene conifer forests in the Rocky Mountains.

Additional links:

New York Times: Pleistocene Treasures, at a Breakneck Pace (July 4, 2011)

NOVA (PBS): Ice Age Death Trap (Dec 15, 2011)

People's Press: Digging Snowmastodon: Discovering an ice age world in the Colorado Rockies (Book)

Dr. Steve Jackson's Quaternary Plant Ecology Laboratory webpage

Floristic Inventory of the White River National Forest and Vicinity

Michael Kirkpatrick

Graduate Student, UW Botany Department

Unlike some of my colleagues, I wasn't born with a lens in hand.  I stumbled into botany en route, I thought, to a career in wildlife management and a desire to work with wolves.  As with many aspects of nature, learning about one leads to deeper, unexpected questions about the whole, and during a volunteer experience at a wolf sanctuary in Colorado I "discovered" my interest in plants.

Ron Hartman and Josh Irwin in the
Colorado River Valley, Mesa County

Subsequently, I've been able to develop my skills and interests in botany through several seasons of work with the US Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Park Service.  As I became more involved in field botany, and the itinerant lifestyle it requires, I developed a nagging feeling that my work with rare plants was just scratching the surface.  I got to know a select number of taxa particularly well, but I was mostly ignorant when it came to the rest of plant biodiversity.  I also felt that I didn't have a framework to help me make sense of what I was seeing from place-to-place and year-to-year.

These concerns, coupled with fortuitous mentoring by former graduates of the Hartman lab (Brian Elliott, Walt Fertig and Laura Welp-Fertig), set me on my current path.  I can honestly say I've found in Ron Hartman's program exactly what I was seeking those many years, and more.

Over the past two summers, I and other collaborators, including Ron Hartman, Ernie Nelson, and Lori Brummer, have collected over 11,400 specimens from the White River NF and adjacent lands south of the Colorado River.  My study area comprises about 4,200 mi2 in northwest Colorado.  It is located on the west slope of the Rocky Mountains, spanning from the eastern edge of the Colorado Plateau to the Continental Divide, and includes all or part of Summit, Pitkin, Eagle, Mesa, Garfield and Gunnison counties.  It comprises a fascinating geological cross section of Colorado, beginning in the mesa country to the west and passing eastward, and upward, through the Precambrian uplifts that comprise the Elk, Sawatch, Gore, and Front Ranges.

Hiking the Continental Divide through Summit County

Geologic, topographic, and substrate diversities provide a multitude of habitats, ranging from steppes and shrublands to alpine meadows, from rock faces and talus slopes to fens and riparian corridors.  Habitat diversity contributes to great plant diversity, including numerous local and regional endemics.

During the summer of 2010, I found over 50 taxa tracked by the Colorado Natural Heritage Program, and many more "rare" species will be tallied before I’m done.  With about one third of my specimens identified, I've counted well over 600 unique taxa representing about 60 vascular plant families.

Over the coming year I’m looking forward to finding out what other surprises await in the 30 or more boxes of specimens remaining.  This curiosity keeps me coming back to the microscope day after day with renewed interest.  Some people read mystery novels; I look forward to the mysteries locked up (for now) inside my plant specimens and what they can tell me (and us) about one small corner of the natural world.

This winter promises to be busy and exciting, watching snow quietly descend over the UW campus while working through my backlog of plant collections, each specimen a unique answer to a complex question of nature.

Floristics in the Uncompahgre Basin and Greater Grand Mesa Area

Lori Brummer

Graduate Student, UW Botany Department

Summer 2011: 10,220 miles driven, 263 miles hiked, and 5,206 plants collected. Area: 4,335 square miles including 1,137 square miles of BLM land and 1,407 square miles of Forest Service land. May 27: 3 sites visited, 150 plants collected, 232 miles driven, 12 hours in the field. Don’t be fooled, these floristics projects are really a numbers game.

Adobe hills near Delta Colorado

Located in west-central Colorado, the Uncompahgre Basin and greater Grand Mesa study area ranges in elevation from 4,640 feet along the Gunnison River to the 14,150 foot summit of Mt. Sneffels. There are many trails to hike, lots of back country roads to explore, and innumerable rocks to flatten tires. The study area contains a variety of habitats including desert grass and shrublands, pinyon-juniper woodlands, spruce-fir forests, and alpine slopes. One of the most interesting habitats in the region is the adobe hill badlands. Derived from a layer of Mancos shale, these otherworldly looking hillsides are home to several endemic species including adobe hills thistle (Cirsium perplexans), Uncompahgre bladderpod (Lesquerella vicinia), adobe desert parsley (Lomatium concinnum), and adobe hills beardtongue (Penstemon retrorsus). Also found on these hillsides and in the surrounding desert landscape is the federally threatened Colorado hookless cactus, Sclerocactus glaucus.

Dominguez Canyon

Two major landforms in the region are Grand Mesa and the Uncompahgre Plateau, both excellent refuges when the temperatures in the lowlands top out at over 100 degrees. Grand Mesa, a large basalt covered mesa that reaches elevations of over 11,000 feet, is covered with spruce-fir forests, aspen woodlands, hundreds of small lakes, high elevation fens, and mosquitoes galore. The west and southwest sections of the study area are bounded by the Uncompahgre Plateau, a distinctive uplift that is part of the Colorado Plateau. Gently sloping up from the valley, it reaches elevations of over 10,000 feet. The plateau is ribboned with a series of canyons, created by down cutting of streams through mostly sedimentary rocks. One of the most beautiful of these is Dominguez Canyon with high, red sandstone walls, seeps that contain Eastwood’s Monkeyflower (Mimulus eastwoodiae), big horn sheep, and hordes of pinyon gnats.

A floristics project is not for the faint of heart – the days are long (this is not a 9-5 gig!), the work physically demanding, most of it solitary, and some of those backcountry roads…! However, with creativity, friends and family can be convinced to help. I owe much of my successful 2011 season to those who joined me in the field including Ernie Nelson, Linda Deeds, and Kim Hansen. Of course, being herbarium manger, Ernie had to help, but that makes him no less fun to be in the field with – especially since he presses what he collects. Non-botanist friends Kim and Linda traveled out from Nebraska to experience some time in the high country. Not only were they better at getting the whole plant than I, but they enjoyed pressing, and even numbered extra newsprint before heading back to the flatlands. The family dogs joined my husband Joe in the field with me on occasion. They were great company, but often more entertainment than help. As Joe has been totally supportive of this venture in more ways than one, he is forgiven for not wanting to help press plants. Botanical assistant of the year, though, has to go to my youngest son, Tyler. A graduate student at Montana State University, he made time in his busy mountain biking schedule to come down and backpack with me into Wetterhorn Basin. A pretty good botanist, not only did he collect the highest part of the basin, but he hauled out about 300 of the 400 plants we collected.

Colorado hookless cactus, Sclerocactus glaucus

The days are shorter now, but the hours are still long. The product of a field season and a half, about 6,500 collections, sit in boxes, most of which await identification. Now, there’s a number I don’t want to think about – especially since another full season is planned on the project! Classes, herbarium work, and commuting from Fort Collins have certainly slowed down the id process. And even though I enjoy herbarium work and identifying the plants I have collected, I find my mind wandering to the adventures of last summer. Flushing ptarmigan and sage grouse chicks, watching a bear and her cub climb a tree, long hikes, and backcountry excursions. What a job – driving down a road just to see what’s there, hiking, collecting plants, all in a landscape that can move me to tears. Is it summer yet?

Revised on: 3 Feb 2012


NOTE: Thanks to Dorde Woodruff for making me aware of the common name change for Sclerocactus glaucus.

A Floristic inventory of the Salmon-Challis National Forest

Josh Irwin

Graduate Student, UW Botany Department

During two summers in east-central Idaho, I saw more mountains and desert lands than many Americans see in their entire lives. This region includes seven major mountain ranges and most of Idaho's top 100 summits. There are hundreds of miles of deep gorges along the Salmon River and its tributaries. To the north, one finds groves of grand fir and alpine larch, while to the south, one finds saltbush, greasewood and desert annuals more typical of the Great Basin. In many areas, local relief is nearly a vertical mile from valley bottom to ridgetop. Whenever I climbed to the top of a ridge or peak, I would look out in every direction where, as far as I could see . . . my study area. Since the project was funded by the Salmon-Challis National Forest, most collections (ca. 11,000) occur on US Forest Service lands. Where species were expected to occur exclusively on low elevation BLM lands, these areas were also surveyed.

Foothills of the Lost River Range;
careful driving is necessary in a 2wd.

All the numbers add up to an enormous project, leaving little time for leisure. The commitment to a floristic inventory is not to be taken lightly; 12-14 hr. work days are the norm both in the field and at the herbarium. I can remember early on in my first semester here at UWyo. I thought to myself, “wow, I just finished identifying 150 plants”. Now, at the time of this writing, I’ve identified around six thousand specimens. After awhile it becomes a routine – though each specimen is unique, the process of identification is a careful balance between speed and confidence. I was not altogether inexperienced when I first arrived at UWyo, but I had never undertaken a project of such a grand scale.

While many refer to a floristic inventory as descriptive science, there are many subtle questions which one could explore with additional time and motivation. For example, what biogeographic factors influence the occurrence and distribution of the flora? what are the patterns of diversity across environmental gradients? Between patches, localities and regions? In such an inventory, one practically expects to discover new populations of rare plants, but there is also the slight chance of finding an undiscovered species.

A Floristic inventory of the Ashland and Sioux Ranger Districts of Custer National Forest

Hans Hallman
Graduate Student, UW Botany Department

June 2009 saw the start of two field seasons of floristic inventory of the Sioux and Ashland Ranger Districts of Custer National Forest in southeastern Montana and northwestern South Dakota, as well as surrounding BLM lands. Having come straight from field work in southern Nevada where I was working in burned landscapes where trees are few and far between, the ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests and relatively lush green ash (Fraxinus pennsylvanica) draws of Custer were quite a change in scenery. Overall, ca. 9,000 plant specimens were collected during the summers of 2009 and 2010, with a quick trip back in 2011 to pick up a couple of specimens of coralroot (Corallorhiza sp.) and orchard grass (Dactylis glomerata) in a more identifiable condition than when I first located them in 2010.

A green-ash draw along with grass- and badlands

Interesting habitat types completely exotic to me when I began the project were the numerous badlands that I was able to collect on. Hosting a sparse, yet distinctive, vegetative community, including species such as saltgrass (Distichlis spicata) and greasewood (Sarcobatus vermiculatus), the badlands and their exposed substrate horizons of dark brown to rose to white, and rain-sculpted rills and gullies sometimes 50 or more feet deep, often had me thinking I was on a different planet, especially after a long, tiring day of solo hiking and collecting. A highlight of collecting in one of these habitats was locating a new population of Visher’s buckwheat (Eriogonum visheri) in Montana, only the second population known from the state.

Thanks to tips throughout the collecting seasons from Sioux District Ranger Kurt Hansen, access to certain areas of the forest was streamlined, and several populations of regionally rare plants were located, including lesser yellow lady’s slipper (Cypripedium parviflorum var. parviflorum).

Identification of plant material is nearing completion, and I expect to soon start writing my thesis.

Botany researchers find rare plants in the eastern US

During the extensive and productive 2011 field season, Botany Ph.D student Nick Dowie and Prof. Steven Miller were able to locate populations of the non-photosynetheic plant Pterospora andromedea in New York and New Hampshire.

Botany student Nick Dowie collecting samples in summer 2011

This plant, which depends on a symbiotic fungus to provide its carbon and energy (i.e. mycoheterotrophic), is rare and endangered in New England but is thriving in the west. In the east, P. andromedea is solely associated with eastern white pine, but in the west it is associated with many autotrophic tree hosts such as lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir.

The working hypotheses on the decline of Pterospora in the east is that either its disjunct distribution has resulted in a dangerous lack of genetic diversity in a changing environment or that the fungus with which it is associated is genetically depauperate, resulting in an an inefficient symbiosis that cannot sustain the relationship.  

Finding and collecting the rare eastern samples will allow them to test both hypotheses with powerful molecular approaches. Interested in learning more about Dr. Miller's research - visit his lab's website or email him.

Rocky Mountain Herbarium News

Ron Hartman

(Editor’s note: Ron Hartman was first Vice-President of Wyoming Native Plant Society and is Curator of the Rocky Mountain Herbarium.)

            Whether you visit Rocky Mountain Herbarium on-line or on foot, you will notice major changes[1]. We are in a constant expansion mode that has recently translated to a new floor plan and magnitudes more scanned specimens for viewing online.  The current holdings of Rocky Mountain Herbarium (RM) combined with the National Herbarium of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) contain 871,710 accessions; the William G. Solheim Mycological Herbarium (RMS) contains 48,000 for a total of 919,710 specimens, up from 302,000 in 1977. Also, University of Wyoming (UW) - College of Agriculture houses the A.A. Beetle Grass Herbarium (WYAC; 60,000 accessions). The combined holdings of these herbaria rank UW at 15^th of more than 750 herbaria in the nation, 5^th for a state institution. A backlog of over 230,000 collections (identified, data based, with labels) is available for study by researchers. It may appear that we have been gaining on this backlog as during the past 10 years, we have processed over 191,300 specimens. Surprisingly, we have obtained roughly an equal number of collections from our aggressive regional inventories. If we were current on the backlog, the collections would consist of more than 1.42 million plant and fungal specimens ranking UW 10^th in the nation, 3^rd for a state institution. These combined UW accessions represent the largest holding of vascular plants and fungi, by a factor of 3, between the Mississippi and West Coast.

Due to the rapid expansion of the collections, space in existing cabinets has been inadequate. For example, more than 120,000 mounted specimens are just sitting in hopper boxes. Consequently, three rooms on the third floor of the Aven Nelson Building adjoining the RM were renovated this past summer, thanks to Greg Brown, Botany Department Head.  This fall, 176 cabinets (sunflower yellow) were secured from Steel Fixture, Topeka, Kansas.  These, with the inclusion of 32 cabinets that have had other uses, have lead to space for about 416,000 new specimens, or a 40 percent increase in capacity. The specimens as a whole can now be evenly dispersed throughout the old and new cabinets and the mounted specimens in hopper boxes can be inserted. 

          On-line, the scanned images of specimen accessions have mushroomed, including scanned images of the Grand Teton National Park Herbarium (7,500) and of the recently completed thesis on the flora of Grand Teton National Park and Pinyon Peak Highlands (8,200; Kesonie 2009, Kesonie and Hartman 2011).  This makes the Teton County flora visually available to everyone with internet access, even if it is not a simple matter for you to travel to RM or the Park herbarium. 

          You are invited to visit RM any time - on-line and on foot as part of the 2012 WNPS annual meeting in Laramie next June.

Literature Cited

Kesonie, D. 2009. A floristic inventory of Grand Teton National Park and the Pinyon Peak Highlands, Wyoming. M.S. Botany, University of Wyoming.

Kesonie, D.T. and R.L. Hartman. 2011. A floristic inventory of Grand Teton National Park, Pinyon Peak Highlands, and Vicinity, Wyoming, U.S.A. Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas 5(1): 357-388.

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[1] See also: 2009. Rocky Mountain Herbarium at Your Fingertips, Castilleja 28(3): 3-4; and

Schmidt, L. 2010. Gold Standards of the Plant Kingdom Go Online. Castilleja 29(3): 7.

Looking at Water Stress Spectrally

                                            Tim Aston measures spectral reflectance of a plant experiencing drought.

Students in BOT 4111/5111, An Introduction to Remote Sensing of the Environment, are required to complete a self-designed research project by the end of the semester that applies remote sensing concepts learned in class.  Tim Aston, a graduate student in Brent Ewers' lab, took on a unique project; he's using a spectrometer to see how the reflectance of light from a plant leaf changes as the leaf dries.  His hypothesis is that drought stress will be visible in the "red edge," the spectral region between the visible red and the near-infrared, and in a water absorption band at around 960 nm.  Ultimately, Tim hopes to be able to use remote sensing to identify plants that express differences in genetic traits related to the movement of water through their leaves.  

Botany research work provides tools for plant conversation efforts in Wyoming

Walter Fertig recently completed his doctoral degree requirements. His research focused on a) characterizing species rarity patterns in Wyoming, b) mapping areas at risk for losing species, and c) developing quantitative methods to assess where species at risk are currently present and where they could grow in the state. Dr. Fertig developed a ranking system that evaluates species rarity and identify areas for conservation priority which is used by land management agencies in Wyoming.

Click on any of these links for more information:

1. The BLM modeling report by Fertig and Thurston (2003) (4MB)
2. Appendices for species abstracts and background info on the 44 species(35MB)
3. Species distribution models(31MB).

UW News Article

Contact Information:
Walter Fertig
Moenave Botanical Consulting
1117 W Grand Canyon Dr.
Kanab, UT, 84741, USA
Phone: 435-644-8129
Email: walt@kanab.net