Plant Systematics, Conservation Biology, and Ethnobotany

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Wendy L. Applequist

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Wendy L. Applequist

Associate Curator

Description of new species of Homalium from Madagascar. Applequist works on medicinal plants projects and the taxonomy of flora of Madagascar. She is currently working on taxonomic revisionary studies of Homalium, a pantropical genus of Salicaceae sensu lato that encompasses exceptional variation in floral morphology, in the biodiversity hotspot of Madagascar. Six sections occur in Madagascar, four of them endemic. The existing taxonomy is quite obsolete, and preliminary work indicates that new species will be described in at least five sections; the first for which a treatment was completed, sect. Eumyriantheia, is going from 10 species to 15 species, five of them new. The participating student will learn taxonomic revisionary skills such as pattern recognition and delimitation of taxa, record measurements and qualitative data from specimens, and compile species descriptions; the student is expected to co-author a manuscript revising a section of Homalium.

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