Drought year
Scouted most of the Phacelia peirsoniana paratype localities [here, Sherwin Summit with Jim Linnberg and Trigger the service dog] and accessible Consortium of California Herbaria specimen sites on this trip based out of UC SNARL. Love that place. Too dry in some places for some of the target species I was looking for [also looked for Phacelia tetramera out on alkali sinks], but there are patches of blooms where precipitation seems to have struck and stuck.
A really good trip, and I wish I could have stayed out another week at least. Next year I hope it rains, and I can go in April and again in May to catch these taxa.
This was also the first trip I had an iPhone and definitely prefer my Nikon for photos. But for planning out a daily botany itinerary with the Jepson eFlora, Consortium of California Herbaria search results, Google maps, and CalPhotos – I used that iphone nonstop when there was areas with service. Tom Schweich’s area list for Mono County is AWESOME – full of great resources, as is Tim Messick’s Bodie Hills flora.
Phacelia [?] var. heliophila
![This is why I love nomenclature, I love taxonomy, I love collections, I love digitized archives and libraries offsite, and I love going to the field and finding plants that match protologues. Because even in California, even in 2013, even in Phacelia, there are mysteries and there is disagreement. What is this? I have an idea, but I have to rigorously test it. Stay tuned [and on botany time, so 3+ yrs for data collection, analysis, and publication].](http://www.genevievekwalden.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/var_heliophila.jpg)
This is why I love nomenclature, I love taxonomy, I love collections, I love digitized archives and libraries offsite, and I love going to the field and finding plants that match protologues. Because even in California, even in 2013, even in Phacelia, there are mysteries and there is disagreement. What is this? I have an idea, but I have to rigorously test it. Stay tuned [and on botany time, so 3+ yrs for data collection, analysis, and publication].
Cal Photo of the Day – Phacelia viscida
The UC Berkeley homepage photo of the day [by Martin Sundberg] highlights the super cool work of the Gordon Frankie lab and the Urban Bee Gardens.
Their awesome research is expanding the applied uses and economic utility of Phacelia taxa in agriculture and apiculture.
And what’s that in the foreground? Phacelia viscida!
One month to go!
The Jepson Workshop to the White Mountains is coming up and I am excited to revisit the area again. I had a chance to go on the 2009 Workshop and it was amazing. Of course. There was snow, there were bristlecones, and of course there were phacelias.
factoids of fun
I made this a while back, as I was thinking about different ways to present some of the little stories that have accumulated through all this research in the genus and subfamily. I believe that alternative ways to tell these stories are really nice to have throughout the progress of the research [research does progress, it really does]. I’m thinking more like mini-graphic zines of the Small Science Collective [really cool] for a single narrative.
And maybe some die-cut stickers in the future.
Field Notebooks
Michael Eisen wrote a blog post last year noting a super amazing inclusion of the digitized lab notebooks as part of the supplemental materials [Lang and Botstein 2011]. My lab work has somewhat been on pause with classes [IS290 and IB200A] and studying for orals this semester, but come the end of April – I am going to do this with my lab notebooks as I progress through experiments in the Baldwin genomics lab and the MPL.
Along that vein, I will also put up my field notebooks from this year, probably the whole notebook at the end of the season, and additional notes from individual collection events posted as updates inside posts – this one includes the corolla dissections and sketches of ovules. And yes, after upload I realized that penciled drawings don’t scan as well as inked illustrations – so will keep that in mind for the future.
Posting my field notebooks serves as part organization, part transparency, part scholarship, part archival, part communication, part trying to be a better practitioner of science. I also believe that creating a clear link between the collection event and the accessioned specimen may motivate me to decrease the time between collection and accession, which can contribute to the lag time in species descriptions – not that I am collecting anything new [Bebber et al. 2010].
I benefit so much from reading the online digitized field notebooks of Willis Linn Jepson, Reid Moran and others [the Smithsonian has an entire Field Book Project - AMAZING, go look at it], and visiting archives to read field notebooks of the Cantelows and John Thomas Howell at California Academy of Sciences. Other archives I really would like to visit are those of Marcus E. Jones, because Parry stole my rose [Dorst 2010; Jones 1930].
The field season is slower this year due to drought and next year will be my big field year, but there are still opportunities to describe some of the field diversity in a group like the [mostly Californian] Ramosissimae, which includes Phacelia distans and Phacelia malvifolia. I have been really inspired by the amazing scientific illustrations that John Myers has been doing for the FNANM treatment, and Dr. Strother also encouraged me [in the words of Terry Allen] to practice drawing. I limned the basics from the Phacelia californica that I collected for the Jepson Manual 101 clinic, and pressed the voucher in my Herbarium Supply plant press. I am always interested in best practices for collecting specimens and making vouchers [see one of M.E.Jones writings on collecting here], and not just because it is part of the IS290 class project for the UC Berkeley Botanic Garden!
Literature cited
BEBBER, D. P., M. A. CARINE, J. R. I. WOOD, A. H. WORTLEY, D. J. HARRIS, G. T. PRANCE, G. DAVIDSE, J. PAIGE, T. D. PENNINGTON, N. K. B. ROBSON, and R. W. SCOTLAND. 2010. Herbaria are a major frontier for species discovery. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107(51):22169-22171.
DORST, D. 2010. The surf guru: stories. New York, Riverhead Books.
JONES, M. E. 1930. Botanical reminiscences. Contributions to Western Botany 17:1-31.
LANG, G. I., and D. BOTSTEIN. 2011. A Test of the Coordinated Expression Hypothesis for the Origin and Maintenance of the GAL Cluster in Yeast. PLoS ONE 6(9):e25290.
FNANM
Deb Trock wrote up a really nice piece in the current Flora of North America (FNANM) newsletter featuring student authors and their treatments – and Rebecca Stubbs and I are in the latest issue on the website [July-December 2011]. Rebecca works on Polemonium, and has a great website describing her research at SFSU with Dr. Patterson.
We tried to take some photos for Dr. Trock to use, but we were laughing pretty hard. Brennan Wenck-Riley [grad student of Dennis Desjardin] snapped a semi-serious pose with Laura Garrison’s Phacelia specimens in the Harry D. Thiers herbarium, photo is courtesy of his patient efforts. Left to right in the photo are Trigger the service dog, me, Dr. Robert Patterson, and Rebecca Stubbs.
