Iván Jiménez, Ph.D.
Scientist Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development
Research Interests
• Species concepts and delimitations
• Spatial patterns of species diversity and distributions
• Ecological computer modeling
Georgia Thomas
Plant Records Data Specialist
Horticulture Division
Research Interests
• Ex-situ plant conservation
Rebecca Sucher
Senior Manager, Living Collections
Horticulture Division
Research Interests
• Ex-situ plant conservation
Opportunity for selection in ex situ living collections for plant conservation. Jiménez is an Associate Scientist in the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development; his research program seeks to determine the factors that determine the abundance and distribution of species at various spatial scales. Thomas is a Plant Records Data Specialist in the Horticulture Division interested in ex-situ conservation of rare and endangered plants. Sucher is MBG’s Senior Manager of Living Collections in the Horticulture Division; her research interests include the ex-situ conservation of rare and endangered plants. As anthropogenic pressures on biodiversity grow, conservation of plant diversity increasingly requires the maintenance of populations under intensive management, in ex situ collections that serve as safeguards against extinction of wild populations. A major goal of these ex situ collections is to represent intraspecific variation of species of conservation concern, maintaining equal representation of several maternal lines from multiple provenances. Management of these collections would ideally minimize the loss of intraspecific variation through time due to plant death. Because some plant death is often inevitable in living collections, managers would benefit from knowing the extent to which loss of intraspecific variation exceeds what would be expected by chance, given an observed dead rate. Higher than expected losses would indicate that unintentional selection (sometimes referred to as “unconscious” selection) is eroding the conservation value of the ex situ collection. In this project, a student will measure the extent to which unintentional selection has affected an ex situ living collection of a threatened oak species (Quercus arkansana) at the Missouri Botanical Garden. To do so, the student will apply concepts of evolutionary theory related to selection coefficients and opportunity for selection. The student participating in this project will use the R environment (http://www.r-project.org/) to manipulate data, perform computer simulations and conduct statistical analyses. No previous experience with statistics or the R environment is needed; if the student is not familiar with the R environment or basic statistics, a strong disposition to learn a computer language and statistics is required. The student will also contribute to the collection of data from living collections of other species at the Missouri Botanical Garden.