Bacterial communities vary across populations and tissue type in red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle, Rhizophoraceae) along an expanding front.

Plant-associated microbial communities may be important sources of functional diversity and genetic variation that influence host evolution. Bacteria provide benefits for their hosts, yet in most plant systems we know little about their taxonomic composition or variation across tissues and host range. Red Mangrove (Rhizophora mangle L.

Digital Extended Specimens: Enabling an Extensible Network of Biodiversity Data Records as Integrated Digital Objects on the Internet.

The early twenty-first century has witnessed massive expansions in availability and accessibility of digital data in virtually all domains of the biodiversity sciences. Led by an array of asynchronous digitization activities spanning ecological, environmental, climatological, and biological collections data, these initiatives have resulted in a plethora of mostly disconnected and siloed data, leaving to researchers the tedious and time-consuming manual task of finding and connecting them in usable ways, integrating them into coherent data sets, and making them interoperable. The focus to date has been on elevating analog and physical records to digital replicas in local databases prior to elevating them to ever-growing aggregations of essentially disconnected discipline-specific information.

Mobilizing the community of biodiversity specimen collectors to effectively detect and document outliers in the Anthropocene.

Premise: Biological outliers (observations that fall outside of a previously understood norm, e.g., in phenology or distribution) may indicate early stages of a transformative change that merits immediate attention.

Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections (WeDigBio): The Biocollections Community's Citizen-Science Space on the Calendar.

The digitization of biocollections is a critical task with direct implications for the global community who use the data for research and education. Recent innovations to involve citizen scientists in digitization increase awareness of the value of biodiversity specimens; advance science, technology, engineering, and math literacy; and build sustainability for digitization. In support of these activities, we launched the first global citizen-science event focused on the digitization of biodiversity specimens: Worldwide Engagement for Digitizing Biocollections (WeDigBio).

The phylogeny and biogeography of Hakea (Proteaceae) reveals the role of biome shifts in a continental plant radiation.

The frequency of evolutionary biome shifts during diversification has important implications for our ability to explain geographic patterns of plant diversity. Recent studies present several examples of biome shifts, but whether frequencies of biome shifts closely reflect geographic proximity or environmental similarity of biomes remains poorly known. We explore this question by using phylogenomic methods to estimate the phylogeny of Hakea, a diverse Australian genus occupying a wide range of biomes.

Paraphyly changes understanding of timing and tempo of diversification in subtribe Hakeinae (Proteaceae), a giant Australian plant radiation.

Premise Of The Study: Subtribe Hakeinae (526 spp.) represents a large Australian plant radiation central to our understanding of that flora's evolution and ecology. It contains Grevillea-the third largest plant genus in Australia and a group inferred to have among the highest diversification rates in the angiosperms.

Digitization workflows for flat sheets and packets of plants, algae, and fungi.

Effective workflows are essential components in the digitization of biodiversity specimen collections. To date, no comprehensive, community-vetted workflows have been published for digitizing flat sheets and packets of plants, algae, and fungi, even though latest estimates suggest that only 33% of herbarium specimens have been digitally transcribed, 54% of herbaria use a specimen database, and 24% are imaging specimens. In 2012, iDigBio, the U.

Finding our way through phenotypes.

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes.

Five task clusters that enable efficient and effective digitization of biological collections.

This paper describes and illustrates five major clusters of related tasks (herein referred to as task clusters) that are common to efficient and effective practices in the digitization of biological specimen data and media. Examples of these clusters come from the observation of diverse digitization processes. The staff of iDigBio (The U.

Time-calibrated phylogeny of the woody Australian genus Hakea (Proteaceae) supports multiple origins of insect-pollination among bird-pollinated ancestors.

Premise Of The Study: A past study based on morphological data alone showed that the means by which plants of the Australian genus Hakea reduce florivory is related to the evolution of bird pollination. For example, bird pollination was shown to have arisen only in insect-pollinated lineages that already produced greater amounts of floral cyanide, a feature that reduces florivory. We examine a central conclusion of that study, and a common assumption in the literature, that bird pollination arose in insect-pollinated lineages, rather than the reverse.

Contrasted patterns of hyperdiversification in Mediterranean hotspots.

Dating the Tree of Life has now become central to relating patterns of biodiversity to key processes in Earth history such as plate tectonics and climate change. Regions with a Mediterranean climate have long been noted for their exceptional species richness and high endemism. How and when these biota assembled can only be answered with a good understanding of the sequence of divergence times for each of their components.

Origin, adaptive radiation and diversification of the Hawaiian lobeliads (Asterales: Campanulaceae).

The endemic Hawaiian lobeliads are exceptionally species rich and exhibit striking diversity in habitat, growth form, pollination biology and seed dispersal, but their origins and pattern of diversification remain shrouded in mystery. Up to five independent colonizations have been proposed based on morphological differences among extant taxa. We present a molecular phylogeny showing that the Hawaiian lobeliads are the product of one immigration event; that they are the largest plant clade on any single oceanic island or archipelago; that their ancestor arrived roughly 13 Myr ago; and that this ancestor was most likely woody, wind-dispersed, bird-pollinated, and adapted to open habitats at mid-elevations.

A smaller Macadamia from a more vagile tribe: inference of phylogenetic relationships, divergence times, and diaspore evolution in Macadamia and relatives (tribe Macadamieae; Proteaceae).

Tribe Macadamieae (91 spp., 16 genera; Proteaceae) is widespread across the southern hemisphere on all major fragments of Gondwana except New Zealand and India. Macadamia is cultivated outside its natural range as a "nut" crop (notably in Hawaii, where it is the principal orchard crop).

Are any primroses (Primula) primitively monomorphic?

Primula (c. 430 species) and relatives (Primulaceae) are paradigmatic to our understanding of distyly. However, the common co-occurrence of distyly and monomorphy in closely related groups within the family has made the interpretation of its evolution difficult.

Buzz-pollinated Dodecatheon originated from within the heterostylous Primula subgenus Auriculastrum (Primulaceae): a seven-region cpDNA phylogeny and its implications for floral evolution.

We sequenced seven cpDNA regions from 70 spp. in Dodecatheon, Primula subgenus Auriculastrum, and outgroups, reconstructed their cpDNA phylogeny with maximum parsimony, and determined branch support with bootstrap frequencies and Bayesian posterior probabilities. Strongly supported conclusions include the (1) paraphyly of Primula subgenus Auriculastrum with respect to a monophyletic Dodecatheon, (2) sister relationship between the North American Dodecatheon and the Californian P.

Historical biogeography and the origin of stomatal distributions in Banksia and Dryandra (Proteaceae) based on their cpDNA phylogeny.

Banksia and Dryandra have undergone extensive speciation and adaptive radiation, especially in Australia's isolated Southwest Botanical Province. We derive a phylogeny for these groups based on cpDNA sequences and use it to reconstruct their historical biogeography and evolution of leaf traits thought to be adapted to drought and/or nutrient poverty. Slowly evolving regions (trnL intron, trnL/trnF spacer) are used to resolve large-scale relationships; faster evolving regions (rp116 intron, psbA/trnH and trnT/trnL spacers) are used to resolve relationships among closely related species.