THE JEPSON GLOBE A Newsletter from the Friends of The Jepson Herbarium VOLUME 29 NUMBER 1, Spring 2019 Curator’s column: Don Kyhos’s Upcoming changes in the Con- legacy in California botany sortium of California Herbaria By Bruce G. Baldwin By Jason Alexander In early April, my Ph.D. advisor, In January, the Northern California Donald W. Kyhos (UC Davis) turns 90, Botanists Association hosted their 9th fittingly during one of the California Botanical Symposium in Chico, Cali- desert’s most spectacular blooms in fornia. The Consortium of California recent years. Don’s many contributions Herbaria (CCH) was invited to present to desert botany and plant evolution on upcoming changes. The CCH be- in general are well worth celebrating gan as a data aggregator for California here for their critical importance to our vascular plant specimen data and that understanding of the California flora. remains its primary purpose to date. Those old enough to have used Munz’s From 2003 until 2017, the CCH grew A California Flora may recall seeing in size to over 2.2 million specimen re- the abundant references to Raven and cords from 36 institutions. Responding Kyhos’s chromosome numbers, which to requests from participants to display reflect a partnership between Don and specimen data from all groups of plants Peter Raven that yielded a tremendous Rudi Schmid at Antelope Valley Califor- and fungi, from all locations (including body of cytogenetic information about nia Poppy Reserve on 7 April 2003. Photo those outside California), we have de- our native plants. Don’s talents as a by Ray Cranfill. veloped a new Symbiota portal (CCH2). cytogeneticist were put to excellent use In Appreciation: A new en- The development of this new portal has during his long career in studies of evo- dowment fund established by been funded by the California Phenol- lutionary diversification of Californian ogy Thematic Collections Network composites such as Chaenactis, Ence- Rudi Schmid (CAP-TCN). The CAP-TCN was made lia, and the tarweed subtribe Madiinae. By Staci Markos through the Advancing Digitization of The insights that came from those stud- Toward the end of 2018, Rudolf Biological Collections program of the ies are too numerous to detail here, but Schmid established a new endowment National Science Foundation, and all some highlights must be noted. fund for the University and Jepson data resulting from this award will be Don’s studies of Chaenactis (pin- Herbaria. The principal of Rudi’s gift available through the national resource cushions) began when he was a gradu- will be invested in the UC Berkeley iDigBio.org (www.nsf.gov/award- ate student at UCLA working under Foundation and an annual distribution search/showAward?AWD_ID=1802312 Harlan Lewis and Henry Thompson, from the corpus will support research &HistoricalAwards=false). Twenty-two th both luminaries in 20 Century plant and curation, with an emphasis on co- (Continued on page 8) evolution and systematics. Don found nifers, including activities focused on that two widespread desert annuals, systematics, evolution, phylogenetics, ALSO IN THIS ISSUE C. fremontii and C. stevioides, de- floristics, curation, fieldwork, and publi- Conservation insights with big data scended from ancestors referable to C. cation of research in these fields. Funds Lifetime Member special event glabriuscula in the California Floristic may also be used to support graduate 25th anniversary celebration Province and represent evolutionary student appointments in the Herbaria. Jepson eFlora revision 6 William Setchell pipe display (Curator’s column continued on page 2) (Continued on page 11) (Curator’s Column, continued from page 1) limit gene flow between interfertile including California tarweeds, such as species was recently corroborated and his namesake genus, Kyhosia. quantified by experimental field stud- As one of the lucky students who ies and genetic analyses, conducted had the privilege of being part of Don’s by Ph.D. student Chris DiVittorio at lab, I also celebrate him for being a UC Berkeley, involving a coastal-dune superb mentor and human being. He taxon, E. ventorum, and a plant of arid exemplifies the best qualities of a sci- plains, E. palmeri, in Baja California. entist—motivated by curiosity, love of Don also saw great potential in car- nature, and the joy of trying to solve rying forward the classic experimental evolutionary puzzles, rather than a systematic work of the famous Clausen, desire for recognition. His compassion- Keck, and Hiesey research team that ate nurturing of students through thick was based in the Bay Area and had and thin is something for which I will recently concluded its work when Don always be grateful and he will always Don Kyhos at Paliku, Haleakala, East was a postdoctoral researcher with Peter be one of my most treasured and dear Maui, September 1979. Photo by Gerald Raven at Stanford in the early 1960s. friends. Happy birthday, Don! D. Carr. In particular, Don was taken with the shifts into desert conditions associated team’s investigations of California tar- with reduction in chromosome number weeds and encouraged me and other by rearrangement of genetic material graduate students, such as Gerry Carr, onto fewer chromosomes. Those find- to study their evolution. Following ings remain a textbook example of G. Sherwin Carlquist’s anatomical find- L. Stebbins’s idea of selection for in- ings of a close relationship between creased genetic linkage associated with California tarweeds and the Hawaiian specialization, e.g., to harsh environ- silversword alliance, Don initiated ex- ments. Recent molecular phylogenetic perimental work on the silverswords, work in my lab, in collaboration with which blossomed into a major collabo- Don, has corroborated and extended ration with his graduate student Gerry Don’s findings, including the origin of Carr upon Gerry’s hire as a faculty lineages he discovered that currently member at the University of Hawaii, Kyhosia bolanderi, taken at Yuba Pass, are being described as new species. Sierra County, California. Photo by Neal Manoa. Their studies laid a major Kramer. Through careful field, greenhouse, foundation of cytogenetic data on sil- and cytogenetic investigations, Don versword relationships and were a huge marshalled an increasingly strong inspiration that led to my phylogenetic case during his career for the ability of work on the silverswords and relatives, natural selection imposed by a plant’s environment to override other evo- lutionary factors, including potential for gene flow between taxa that grow in proximity and share pollinators. In Encelia (brittlebushes and relatives), Don discovered complete interfertility between desert taxa that commonly oc- cur in adjacent habitats and frequently set hybrid seed that is highly viable and yields vigorous, highly fertile individu- als in cultivation. He found that such hybrids are rarely successful in nature, however, except in highly limited, unusual settings where the parent taxa are not as successful, such as human- caused disturbances. One of Don’s most Chaenactis stevioides, East Mojave Pre- compelling examples of the strength Encelia farinosa, Palo Verde Mountains, serve, California. Photo by Michael Char- that natural selection can impose to California. Photo by James M. Andre. ters, calflora.net. 2 Conservation of the California flora: New insights from big data By Matthew Kling, Ph.D. student, to roll these detailed data into conser- genetic diversity? The app is up and Ackerly Lab, UC Berkeley vation planning frameworks to help running but still being refined—poke California is home to an excep- inform land protection and resource around and let us know what you think! tionally large number of unique and management decisions across the state. threatened plants—a combination of One of the most exciting and chal- diversity and peril that makes it an of- lenging aspects of this project has been ficially designated “world biodiversity exploring the huge, rich, multi-faceted hotspot” or global conservation priority. biodiversity dataset that underlies our But what does it actually mean to say final results. To facilitate this explora- that a particular plant taxon is unique tion both for ourselves and for all of or that a particular site is diverse? And you, we’ve created an interactive web how can we operationalize these con- app called the California Plant Phylo- cepts in a way that may actually be of diversity Atlas (ucjeps.berkeley.edu/ practical use to conservation planning? phylodiversity). The tool visualizes Those are some of the questions at connections between the evolutionary the center of an NSF-funded research tree, the geographic range of every na- initiative here at Berkeley, aimed at tive plant taxon, and the local flora of leveraging the rich biogeographic and every plant community across the state, phylogenetic data found in herbarium helping to answer questions like: What Figure 1. The top 50 highest-priority collections, including data from the is the geographic distribution of the genus Quercus or the family Asteraceae sites for preserving California’s native Consortium of California Herbaria, to plants under three measures of biodi- across the state? How is conservation uncover what patterns of evolutionary versity: genetic uniqueness (divergence, heritage can tell us about the history, status patterned on the phylogenetic yellow), historic speciation rate (diversi- ecology, and conservation value of plant tree? Which plant species and clades fication, fuchsia), and independent evo- communities across the state. are most likely found at a particular lutionary history (survival, sky blue). In the most recent installment of field site? What is the spatial distribu- Areas high in all three measures are in this project, we combined detailed data tion of different measures of phylo- black, from Kling et al., 2018. on the conservation status of every par- cel of land in the state, high-resolution species distribution models for all 5,221 native species of vascular plants, and a new phylogenetic tree representing the entire native flora to estimate which locations across the state should be prioritized for increased land protec- tion (Kling et al.