Science × art: spotlighting unconventional collaborations.

Science × art collaborations can effectively convey scientific insights to a wide audience. Throughout history, art has interpreted the natural world, offering vast, underexplored sources of biodiversity data. These artistic efforts also hold potential as valuable tools for understanding biodiversity.

Guidelines for the effective and ethical sampling of herbaria.

The use of herbaria for science and conservation is enabling greatly enhanced scopes and scales of discovery, exploration and protection of biodiversity. The availability of digital, open-access herbarium data is, perhaps counter-intuitively, expanding the use of physical collections by researchers who use digital collections to find specimens and then sample physical collections for multiomics investigations, including genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics and microbiomics. These investigations are leading to new scientific insights and supporting the development of conservation actions, but they come with a substantial cost: the partial or complete destruction of often irreplaceable specimens, which constitute a global heritage that should be permanently safeguarded for future reference.

A new nuclear phylogeny of the tea family (Theaceae) unravels rapid radiations in genus Camellia.

Molecular analyses of rapidly radiating groups often reveal incongruence between gene trees. This mainly results from incomplete lineage sorting, introgression, and gene tree estimation error, which complicate the estimation of phylogenetic relationships. In this study, we reconstruct the phylogeny of Theaceae using 348 nuclear loci from 68 individuals and two outgroup taxa.

Pleistocene glaciation advances the cryptic speciation of Stellera chamaejasme L. in a major biodiversity hotspot.

The mountains of Southwest China comprise a significant large mountain range and biodiversity hotspot imperiled by global climate change. The high species diversity in this mountain system has long been attributed to a complex set of factors, and recent large-scale macroevolutionary investigations have placed a broad timeline on plant diversification that stretches from 10 million years ago (Mya) to the present. Despite our increasing understanding of the temporal mode of speciation, finer-scale population-level investigations are lacking to better refine these temporal trends and illuminate the abiotic and biotic influences of cryptic speciation.

Incorporating plant phenological responses into species distribution models reduces estimates of future species loss and turnover.

Anthropogenetic climate change has caused range shifts among many species. Species distribution models (SDMs) are used to predict how species ranges may change in the future. However, most SDMs rarely consider how climate-sensitive traits, such as phenology, which affect individuals' demography and fitness, may influence species' ranges.

Collections are truly priceless.

Last month, Duke University in North Carolina announced that it was shuttering its herbarium. The collection consists of nearly 1 million specimens representing the most comprehensive and historic set of plants from the southeastern United States. It also includes extensive holdings from other regions of the world, especially Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies.

Medicinal plants meet modern biodiversity science.

Plants have been an essential source of human medicine for millennia. In this review, we argue that a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to the study of medicinal plants that combines methods and insights from three key disciplines - evolutionary ecology, molecular biology/biochemistry, and ethnopharmacology - is poised to facilitate new breakthroughs in science, including pharmacological discoveries and rapid advancements in human health and well-being. Such interdisciplinary research leverages data and methods spanning space, time, and species associated with medicinal plant species evolution, ecology, genomics, and metabolomic trait diversity, all of which build heavily on traditional Indigenous knowledge.

Plasticity and not adaptation is the primary source of temperature-mediated variation in flowering phenology in North America.

Phenology varies widely over space and time because of its sensitivity to climate. However, whether phenological variation is primarily generated by rapid organismal responses (plasticity) or local adaptation remains unresolved. Here we used 1,038,027 herbarium specimens representing 1,605 species from the continental United States to measure flowering-time sensitivity to temperature over time (S) and space (S).

The evolutionary history of bees in time and space.

Bees are the most significant pollinators of flowering plants. This partnership began ca. 120 million years ago, but the uncertainty of how and when bees spread across the planet has greatly obscured investigations of this key mutualism.

The colonial legacy of herbaria.

Herbarium collections shape our understanding of Earth's flora and are crucial for addressing global change issues. Their formation, however, is not free from sociopolitical issues of immediate relevance. Despite increasing efforts addressing issues of representation and colonialism in natural history collections, herbaria have received comparatively less attention.

Complex climate-mediated effects of urbanization on plant reproductive phenology and frost risk.

Urbanization can affect the timing of plant reproduction (i.e. flowering and fruiting) and associated ecosystem processes.

Phylogenomics and taxon-rich phylogenies of new and historical specimens shed light on the systematics of Hypnea (Cystocloniaceae, Rhodophyta).

Cystocloniacae is a highly diverse family of Rhodophyta, including species of ecological and economic importance, whose phylogeny remains largely unresolved. Species delimitation is unclear, particularly in the most speciose genus, Hypnea, and cryptic diversity has been revealed by recent molecular assessments, especially in the tropics. Here, we carried out the first phylogenomic investigation of Cystocloniaceae, focused on the genus Hypnea, inferred from chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes including taxa sampled from new and historical collections.

Pervasive hybridization during evolutionary radiation of subgenus in mountains of southwest China.

Radiations are especially important for generating species biodiversity in mountainous ecosystems. The contribution of hybridization to such radiations has rarely been examined. Here, we use extensive genomic data to test whether hybridization was involved in evolutionary radiation within subgenus , whose members show strong geographic isolation in the mountains of southwest China.

Herbarium specimens reveal herbivory patterns across the genus Cucurbita.

Premise: Quantifying how closely related plant species differ in susceptibility to insect herbivory is important for understanding the variation in evolutionary pressures on plant functional traits. However, empirically measuring in situ variation in herbivory spanning the geographic range of a plant-insect complex is logistically difficult. Recently, new methods have been developed using herbarium specimens to investigate patterns in plant-insect symbioses across large geographic scales.

The herbarium of the future.

The ~400 million specimens deposited across ~3000 herbaria are essential for: (i) understanding where plants have lived in the past, (ii) forecasting where they may live in the future, and (iii) delineating their conservation status. An open access 'global metaherbarium' is emerging as these specimens are digitized, mobilized, and interlinked online. This virtual biodiversity resource is attracting new users who are accelerating traditional applications of herbaria and generating basic and applied scientific innovations, including e-monographs and floras produced by diverse, interdisciplinary, and inclusive teams; robust machine-learning algorithms for species identification and phenotyping; collection and synthesis of ecological and genomic trait data at large spatiotemporal and phylogenetic scales; and exhibitions and installations that convey the beauty of plants and the value of herbaria in addressing broader societal issues.

Selecting the best candidates for resurrecting extinct-in-the-wild plants from herbaria.

Resurrecting extinct species is a fascinating and challenging idea for scientists and the general public. Whereas some theoretical progress has been made for animals, the resurrection of extinct plants (de-extinction sensu lato) is a relatively recently discussed topic. In this context, the term 'de-extinction' is used sensu lato to refer to the resurrection of 'extinct in the wild' species from seeds or tissues preserved in herbaria, as we acknowledge the current impossibility of knowing a priori whether a herbarium seed is alive and can germinate.

PhyloHerb: A high-throughput phylogenomic pipeline for processing genome skimming data.

Premise: The application of high-throughput sequencing, especially to herbarium specimens, is rapidly accelerating biodiversity research. Low-coverage sequencing of total genomic DNA (genome skimming) is particularly promising and can simultaneously recover the plastid, mitochondrial, and nuclear ribosomal regions across hundreds of species. Here, we introduce PhyloHerb, a bioinformatic pipeline to efficiently assemble phylogenomic data sets derived from genome skimming.

Species Tree Estimation and the Impact of Gene Loss Following Whole-Genome Duplication.

Whole-genome duplication (WGD) occurs broadly and repeatedly across the history of eukaryotes and is recognized as a prominent evolutionary force, especially in plants. Immediately following WGD, most genes are present in two copies as paralogs. Due to this redundancy, one copy of a paralog pair commonly undergoes pseudogenization and is eventually lost.

New directions in tropical phenology.

Earth's most speciose biomes are in the tropics, yet tropical plant phenology remains poorly understood. Tropical phenological data are comparatively scarce and viewed through the lens of a 'temperate phenological paradigm' expecting phenological traits to respond to strong, predictably annual shifts in climate (e.g.

Life history, diversity, and distribution in parasitic flowering plants.

A review of parasitic plant diversity and outstanding disjunct distributions according to an updated functional classification based on these plants’ life cycles.

Widespread homogenization of plant communities in the Anthropocene.

Native biodiversity decline and non-native species spread are major features of the Anthropocene. Both processes can drive biotic homogenization by reducing trait and phylogenetic differences in species assemblages between regions, thus diminishing the regional distinctiveness of biotas and likely have negative impacts on key ecosystem functions. However, a global assessment of this phenomenon is lacking.

Phenological displacement is uncommon among sympatric angiosperms.

Interactions between species can influence successful reproduction, resulting in reproductive character displacement, where the similarity of reproductive traits - such as flowering time - among close relatives growing together differ from when growing apart. Evidence for the overall prevalence and direction of this phenomenon, and its stability under environmental change, remains untested across large scales. Using the power of crowdsourcing, we gathered phenological information from over 40 000 herbarium specimens, and investigated displacement in flowering time across 110 animal-pollinated species in the eastern USA.

Phylogenomics, divergence time estimation and trait evolution provide a new look into the Gracilariales (Rhodophyta).

The Gracilariales is a highly diverse, widely distributed order of red algae (Rhodophyta) that forms a well-supported clade. Aside from their ecological importance, species of Gracilariales provide important sources of agarans and possess bioactive compounds with medicinal and pharmaceutical use. Recent phylogenetic analyses from a small number of genes have greatly advanced our knowledge of evolutionary relationships in this clade, yet several key nodes were not especially well resolved.

Ecophysiological differentiation between life stages in filmy ferns (Hymenophyllaceae).

Desiccation tolerance was a key trait that allowed plants to colonize land. However, little is known about the transition from desiccation tolerant non-vascular plants to desiccation sensitive vascular ones. Filmy ferns (Hymenophyllaceae) represent a useful system to investigate how water-stress strategies differ between non-vascular and vascular stages within a single organism because they have vascularized sporophytes and nonvascular gametophytes that are each capable of varying degrees of desiccation tolerance.