2013 Mentors and Projects

Project: Pollen morphology of Anisophylleaceae. The family Anisophylleaceae (order Cucurbitales) is one of the least known seed plant groups, comprising ca. 66 species in four genera: Anisophyllea with two species in South America, ca. 25 in mainland Africa, four in Madagascar, and ca. 31 in Malesia, Combretocarpus with one species in Sumatra and Borneo, Poga with one species in equatorial Africa, and <...

Project: Describing a new fern species from Africa. George Yatskievych is the Director of the Flora of Missouri Project at MBG, overseeing the production of a new three-volume book on all the species of Missouri. In addition, he does research on various fern groups and parasitic angiosperms. MBG botanical explorations yield a large number of species new to science each year. The job of the plant taxonomist has three parts: 1) to recognize when a specimen represents a...

Project: Documenting the Plants Collected by Early Explorers of Western North America 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. The herbarium currently contains over 6.2 million sheets – one of the largest such collections in the world, and contains significant holdi...