2012 Mentors and Projects

Documenting the Plants Collected by Early Explorers of Western North America and Northern Mexico in the MBG Herbarium. James Solomon is Curator of the Herbarium and oversees a staff of 30 full-time project managers, herbarium assistants, plant mounters, specimen filers, specimen digitizers, in addition to working on Cactaceae and Vitaceae.

Evaluating Seed Characters in Lythraceae (purple loosestrife family). Shirley Graham is considered the world's leading expert on the systematics, phylogenetics, and floristics of the family Lythraceae. The family, with 28 genera and about 620 species, includes a number of important ornamentals and fruit crops, such as pomegranate, crape myrtle and cuphea. Shirley currently works on the floristics and taxonomy of Lythraceae in Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, and Africa, inc...

1) DNA Barcoding the Plants of Shaw Nature Reserve. An exciting new development in plant systematics is the rise of DNA barcoding - the use of standardized short DNA sequences to identify plants and animals to the species level (CBOL Plant Working Group 2009). Although not without problems, DNA barcodes have the potential to revolutionize plant taxonomy by maki...