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In this research project, we trace the closest living relatives of lichens found on the Hawaiian islands to reconstruct the paleogeographical history of the archipelago.
Using the portable XRF to zap decorated earthenware from Tanjay, Philippines...
Learning to use LA-ICP-MS to source decorated earthenware from Tanjay, Phillipines...
Alan will be at the Wildlife Discovery Center’s Reptile Rampage on Sunday, March 13, 2011, from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm.
The west side of Chicago is home to a real botanical oasis.
A 2010 issue of Phytotaxa was dedicated to a group of green land plants commonly referred to as bryophytes. A broad consensus confirms that bryophytes may not be monophyletic, but rather represent three paraphyletic lines, i.e., Marchantiophyta (liverworts), Anthocerotophyta (hornworts), and Bryophyta (mosses). Together, bryophytes are the second largest group of land plants after flowering plants, and are pivotal in our understanding of early land plant evolution. A growing body of evidence is now supporting liverworts as the earliest diverging lineage of embryophytes, i.e., sister to all other groups of land plants.
There remains a critical need to synthesize the vast amount of nomenclatural, taxonomical and global distributional data for liverworts and hornworts. This is fundamental in the efforts towards developing a working list of all known plant species under the auspices of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Such a synthesis has far reaching implications and applications, including providing a valuable tool for taxonomists and systematists, analyzing phytogeographic and diversity patterns, aiding in the assessment of floristic and taxonomic knowledge, and identifying geographical gaps in our understanding of the global liverwort and hornwort flora. We here outline and discuss the methodology as part of an international consortium referred to as the Early Land Plants Today (ELPT) project.
An overview and full details of the project was published in Phytotaxa in 2010 and is freely available (access here)
Lichen collecting in the tropical rainforest of southern Thailand