,
Francisco Encinas-Viso (CANBR – CSIRO) will talk on ‘A window to the past: using museum specimens to study temporal changes of plant-pollinator interactions’
Research collections have multiple uses to answer ecological and evolutionary questions. Importantly, they can provide us with crucial data to look at the past to understand the present. The recent progress of new sequencing technologies and genomics, in general, has allowed us to answer novel research questions using museum specimens that were not possible before. In this talk, Francisco will provide an overview of their project about plant-pollinator interactions and how the use of genomics and museum specimens can help us to answer questions about the effects of climate change in Australian plant-pollinator communities.
Alyssa Weinstein from ANU will speak on ”Curious cases of diversification in sexually deceptive Australian orchids”.
The talk will be held in the ANBG Theatrette.
Alasdair Grigg, Manager, Christmas Island Minesite to Forest Rehabilitation Program, Christmas Island NP will speak on ‘Christmas Island: its flora and the rainforest rehabilitation program’
The Plant Science Group Technical Talk on Monday 1st April, 2019 at 10.30 am in the ANBG Theatrette is titled:
“Another look at eucalypt classification — a 101-gene phylogeny: some taxonomic controversies resolved”
The speaker will be Emeritus Professor Mike Crisp, Ecology and Evolution, Research School of Biology, ANU
Brendan Lepschi, will give a “State of the Nation Update” as it were. He is Curator of the Australian National Herbarium (a collection of 1.4 million specimens covering Australia, Malesia and the SW Pacific) and is also involved in other projects involving plant nomenclature eg compilation and maintenance of the Australian Plant Name Index (APNI) and Australian Plant Census (APC).
(Malesia is a biogeographical region straddling the Equator and the boundaries of the Indomalaya ecozone and Australasia ecozone.)
Place: Theatrette, ANBG
Topic: Do plants evolve differently?
Speaker: Dr Rob Lanfear
ANU Research School of Biology Lanfear Group – Mutation, molecular evolution and phylogenetics
Talk summary:
It’s often assumed that animals and plants evolve differently because animals have a segregated germ line but plants don’t. If this is true, then plants should accumulate a lot of heritable and potentially harmful mutations in their genomes as they grow. Recent work, including from my lab, is now challenging this long-held view, potentially upending a century of thinking.
Place: Theatrette, ANBG
Topic: Monitoring the condition of ecosystems across the Commonwealth national parks
Speaker: Dr Nick MacGregor, Scientist, Parks Australia.
Talk summary: Nick will talk about the approach being taken by Parks Australia to develop a framework for monitoring and reporting on the condition of and change in ecosystems across the parks that they manage, trying to take into consideration individual priority species, broader biodiversity, habitat and structure, and the ecological processes that underpin all of those. Their current focus is on Australia’s terrestrial parks (Pulu Keeling, Christmas Island, Kakadu, Uluru-Kata Tjuta, Booderee, Norfolk Island), but they hope to extend it eventually to Australia’s marine parks as well.
Place: Theatrette, ANBG
Topic: Can we do biodiversity conservation without species?
Speaker: Dr Dan Rosauer, Post-doctoral Fellow, Moritz Group, Research School
of Biology, ANU.
Talk summary: The idea of using evolutionary relationships to inform
conservation decisions is not new, but we are now at the point where it is
becoming seriously practical. With global and regional examples, Dan will
show how knowledge of evolutionary relationships can support more effective
use of scarce conservation resources. He will argue that with genetic
information, we can often work around unreliable or incomplete taxonomy. In
other words, we can map biodiversity and identify priority areas for
conservation, even if the species are not known. Most of his recent work
happens to be on mammals and lizards, but the concepts work for plants too.
Monday 3rd September, 2018 at 10.30 am in the ANBG Theatrette
Topic: Vegwatch – a quantitative vegetation monitoring program for citizen scientists.
Speaker: Sarah Sharp; consultant ecologist with many years’ experience working as a botanist/ecologist for the ACT Government from the early 1990s.
Talk summary: Since 2012 members of ParkCare and other volunteer groups undertaking management on conservation sites have been monitoring changes in vegetation condition using the Vegwatch program, which is run by the Molonglo Catchment Group. There are now data from 32 plots in 20 locations in the Capital region. Vegwatch methods are quantitative, and compatible with monitoring undertaken by ACT Government and in NSW surveys.
Sarah is currently analysing the data and writing up reports for each site and on the program overall, reviewing the scientific value of the data and issues faced by the volunteers themselves. She will present some of the initial findings from the analyses, as well as discuss some of the issues.
How do we ensure accuracy of information and identification from camera based records?
Speaker: Dr Michael Mulvaney, Research Scientist, Conservation Research Unit, Environment and Sustainable Development Directorate, ACT Government
Canberra Nature Map contains many tens of thousands of records of around 2,000 plant taxa, which have been derived from people loading images directly from smartphones or cameras. There are issues in terms of accuracy of location, nomenclature adopted, uncertainty in identification and the uses that can be made of the data. Nevertheless, Canberra Nature Map is a significant tool in the understanding of plant distribution and abundance and is used daily in plant management and conservation.
Venue: Theatrette, ANBG
Polyploidy in Australian Pomaderris and why it matters for conservation management
Speaker: Dr Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn, CSIRO
Currently a cross-institutional working group coordinated by ANBG’s living collections manager David Taylor and supported by a NSW Environmental Trust grant is working to improve propagation methods and conservation management options for rare species of the native shrub genus Pomaderris (Rhamnaceae). As part of this work, a CSIRO vacation student has
studied differences in genome size and the number of genome copies within and between these species, providing the very first insights into these patterns in native Pomaderris. Alexander will summarise the results of this research and discuss how they fit into and matter for conservation management.
Venue : ANBG Theatrette
Recent work on the ecology of seed dispersal and droughts
Speaker: Dr Robert Godfree, CSIRO scientist with the Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research.
In this talk Bob will discuss results from two CSIRO projects investigating the ecological responses of Australian plant species to drought. In the first project he investigated the role that seed awns play in promoting the surface dispersal and burial of Australian grasses, covering straight, geniculate, bigeniculate and multi-awned forms. The results indicate that awns plays a key role in propagule dispersal and burial, with bigeniculate seeds tending to move further across the soil surface and bury more deeply than other forms. Experiments conducted in a simulated grassland environment also suggest that awn types vary in fitness across different microsites.
In the second part of the talk Bob will discuss the results of an historiographic project aimed at reconstructing the impacts of the Federation Drought (1895-1903) on the Australian biota at the continental scale. The results show that the Federation Drought caused mass mortality of native plants and animals and ecosystem collapse across at least 36% of the continent, and ranks as perhaps the most geographically extensive and impactful drought event observed in the colonial to modern era.
Venue: ANBG Theatrette
Callitris: a chronicle of extinction, survival, dispersal and rediversification
Speaker: Emeritus Professor Mike Crisp, Research School of Biology, ANU, Canberra ACT
Summary: Callitroid conifers (Cupressaceae subfamily Callitroideae) have a rich and ancient fossil record going back 140 Myr to Pangaea but have adapted to the post-Gondwanan world by migrating across oceans and diversifying into new environments, especially the fiery, arid Australian interior. Re-assessing molecular divergence times and trait evolution in
light of a new molecular phylogeny and the exceptional fossil record of the callitroids, we show that both extinction and adaptation have played major roles in this chronicle of turnover and renewal.
Location: ANBG Theatrette
Maintaining databases for Names, Nomenclature and Taxonomy
Speaker: Anne Fuchs, Manager of the ANBG’s Integrated Biodiversity Information System (IBIS)
Summary: Names and taxonomy form the backbone of biodiversity data. Anne will explain how we keep track of this information, including where it is maintained and plans for how it will be used into the future.
After her presentation, Anne will co-host a Q&A session with Anna Monro. Both Anne and Anna are involved with the documentation and standardisation of plant nomenclature in Australia.
Location: ANBG Theatrette
Buzz Pollination of the Native Lasiandra, Melastoma affine (Melastomataceae), revisited and why plants have poricidal anthers
Speaker: Dr Roger Farrow
Talk summary: I have become interested in the pollination syndrome that is the relationship between insect pollinator species and flower type, eg. beetles go to one type of flower, bees to another, butterflies to another etc, depending on the enticements. When I saw native bees doing something strange on Melastoma flowers in the Daintree I found that there was a whole series of papers on this very activity mostly from SE Asia, but my observations indicate other dimensions of bee behaviour at these flowers.
Venue: ANBG Theatrette
Life, the Universe and Pittosporaceae
Our speaker will be Dr Lindy Cayzer, Associate Scientist with the Queensland Herbarium and a visiting scientist at the Australian National Herbarium.
This talk introduces the important, but little known, old East Gondwanan plant family Pittosporaceae, which has all its higher level diversity in Australia: all nine genera and about 100 taxa. Only the genus Pittosporum has escaped the Australasian plate and is now found across the Paleotropics, but why this is so remains unclear. The family is currently being revised across its range, the first comprehensive revision since that of the German Botanist Pritzel in 1930.
Dr Lindy Cayzer was awarded the ABRS Churchill fellowship in 2016 to unlock the critical taxonomic information on the Pittosporaceae held in overseas herbaria and Institutions. She has just returned from completing this research and will be talking about the trials and tribulations of her archaeological dig into the taxonomic confusion of what is the genus Pittosporum.
Rhizanthella and other orchids, an update
Dr Mark Clements, Research Scientist with the Australian National Herbarium and the Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research, Canberra.
Mark is going to talk about the new discovery of a Rhizanthella underground orchid and then update us on new research developments in the study of Glossodia, Caladenia and some other orchids.
Location: ANBG Theatrette
Dispersal and disturbance drive diversity
Dr Crid Fraser, Biologist, Fenner School, ANU. Current ACT Scientist of the Year.
Dr Fraser is broadly interested in the influence of environmental conditions, including past and future environmental change, on global patterns of biodiversity. She uses a wide range of techniques to address research questions, including ecological and genetic approaches, and has a particular focus on the high-latitude ecosystems of the Southern Hemisphere (the sub-Antarctic islands and Antarctica).
Dispersal is a fundamental process that shapes the distributions of many plants. Dispersal is critical for initial colonisation events, particularly following large-scale disturbances. In this talk Dr Fraser will give an overview of how dispersal and disturbance shape spatial patterns of diversity, especially for plants. She will focus on examples from her biogeographic research on diverse Southern Hemisphere systems including sub-Antarctic, Australian and New Zealand seaweeds, and mosses and other organisms in Antarctica.
Top-down rehydration: absorption of atmospheric water (vapour, dew, rain) by leaves of mangroves
Professor Marilyn Ball, FAA, Research School of Biology, ANU
Despite growing in a coastal wetland with an infinite supply of water, the grey mangrove, Avicennia marina, does not rely solely on uptake of water by roots. Instead, the leaves have specialised structures that enable absorption of water from atmospheric sources (water vapour, dew, deliquescence of salt, and interception of rainfall) and water storage. This water supply plays an important role in maintaining leaf functions, especially when highly saline soils limit the capacities of roots to supply water to shoots.
Marilyn Ball received a PhD in Environmental Biology from The Australian National University (1982). She held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley (1981-1984) and the ANU North Australia Research Unit in Darwin (1985-1988), and was awarded an ARC National Research Fellowship in 1989. She has led an eco-physiological research group since appointment in 1990 to a tenured position in biology at ANU, and is a member of the Australian Antarctic Research Advisory Committee.
The meeting will take place in the ANBG Theatrette.
What does Australia’s largest pea-flowered legume genus have in common with the 1988 movie Twins?
Dr Mike Crisp, Ecology & Evolution Unit, Research School of Biology, ANU.
Monday 5th June 2017 at 10.30 am in the ANBG Theatrette.
Daviesia is an archetypal shrubby element of the Australian sclerophyll flora, with 131 species distributed across the continent. New DNA technology has helped us discover some cryptic species. This presentation will cover aspects of the biology of the genus, including its taxonomy, evolutionary diversification, biogeography and adaptive traits.
All things Pelargonium – genetic variation and evolution in South African and Australian Pelargonium.
Dr Caroline Chong, currently Research Technician with the ANBG’s Seed Bank.
Monday 1st May 2017 at 10.30 am in the ANBG Theatrette
Dr Chong will share some of her recent in-progress work as a post-doctoral researcher with the Division of Plant Sciences, Research School of Biology ANU and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut (U.S. NSF Dimensions of Biodiversity project). She’ll talk generally about her research to capture and document population-level variation using South African and Australian Pelargonium as the example.
Transition zones between Australian plant provinces (phytogeographic regions): from plants and myxomycetes
Dr Peter Wellman, Research Associate at ANBG. Peter retired from a career in geology (from palaeontology to geophysics), and is at present a research associate at the ANBG mainly working on the distribution of Australian slime moulds (myxomycetes).
Monday 3rd April 2017 at 10.30 am in the ANBG Theatrette
This talk looks at the nature of the boundaries between the six main plant geographic regions of Gonzalez-Orozco et al. (2014). The boundaries of the regions are found to be generally consistent, within experimental error, with both vascular-plant distribution boundaries (from the best known tree distributions), and myxomycete information. However, the plant information shows that the region boundaries have much smoother curves than the phytogeographic region model, and in many areas a mean annual rainfall contour is the best estimate of the region boundary. The transition zones at the region boundaries are similar in width for the plants and myxomycetes. They are generally 200-300 km wide, but can be as narrow as 140 km and as wide as 440 km. The transition zones cover about 40% of the area of Australia. For vascular plants some plants cross the region boundary, for others their distribution terminates within the transition zone, while a few are restricted in distribution to a band along the transition zone, and can extend for up to 1000 km along it. This pattern of change for vascular plants differs from that found in the only two myxomycete traverses observed across transition zones. On the myxomycete traverses, only a small proportion of the species cross from one region to the other. Most species of a region cross the adjacent transition zone and their distribution ends near the far edge of the transition zone.
Native seed conservation and research
Dr Lydia Guja
Research Scientist and Manager, National Seed Bank at ANBG Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research, CSIRO, Canberra.
Monday 6th March, 2017 at 10.30 am in the ANBG Theatrette
At least 1,253 plant species are listed as threatened with extinction in Australia alone. To protect plants from extinction the National Seed Bank collects and stores seed, and extends seed longevity by storing seeds under special conditions which exploit their inherent ability to survive drying and delay germination. In this presentation Lydia will discuss the seed banking process, some of the science behind it, and the diverse regions that are currently the focus of their efforts at the Seed Bank. She will conclude by presenting results from recent studies into the seed ecology of species we conserve. This research focuses on how environmental variation affects seed dormancy and germination, and therefore the life cycles and establishment of obligate seeding plant species.
Genetics guiding ecological offset work: the example of Rutidosis lanata
Dr Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn,
Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research
Monday 6th February, 2017 at 10.30 am in the ANBG Theatrette
Resource development projects often involve ecological offset work, meaning that new populations of rare or threatened plants are created to offset those that are affected by the development. To produce long-term viable offset populations, it is crucial to have a good understanding of the biology of the managed species, but little is still known about many native Australian species. Alexander will talk about recently finished work on the southern Queensland endemic Rutidosis lanata, a perennial button daisy. The project examined its breeding system and genetics to produce science-based guidelines for seed sourcing to maximise the reproductive success of newly-created populations.
Place: Theatrette, ANBG
Topic: Biodiversity Research Program for Parks Australia
Speaker: Dr Judy West, AO, Executive Director, ANBG
Talk summary: Not only does Parks Australia manage the Commonwealth’s iconic national parks, but it also undertakes and funds a range of research projects for scientific study, providing information for better park management decisions. Judy will provide an overview of this program with an emphasis on those with a botanical focus.
Date & Time: Monday 4th August 2014 at 10.30 am
Place: Crosbie Morrison Building, ANBG
Topic: Christmas Island flora survey
Speaker: Dr Brendan Lepschi (Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research and Curator of the Australian National Herbarium).
Talk summary: Christmas Island is often in the news, but frequently not for the best of reasons. Join Brendan Lepschi for an overview of the 2012 Christmas Island flora survey, and learn about the unusual flora of this isolated island.
Place: ANBG Theatrette (changed from Crosbie Morrison Building)
Topic: Filling gaps in botanical collections: ACT and NSW Alps Bush Blitz
Speakers: Bronwyn Collins (Curation Co-ordinator, Australian National Herbarium) and Emma Clifton (Australian National Herbarium)
Talk summary: Bronwyn and Emma participated in a ‘Bush Blitz’ in December 2014, organised by the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS) located at the ANBG. They will talk about the Herbarium’s role in such a Blitz and interesting botanical specimens that they found.
Date & Time: Monday 2nd June, 2014 at 10.30 am
Place: Crosbie Morrison Building, ANBG
Topic: Vegetation of the ACT
Speaker: Dr Rosemary Purdie, Ecologist
Talk summary: Rosemary will give a brief summary of how vegetation is described, classified and mapped and then give an overview of the different types and locations of vegetation in the Territory.
ANBG Friends Plant Science Group Technical Talk
Date & Time: Monday 5th May, 2014 at 10.30 am
Place: Crosbie Morrison Building, ANBG
Topic: Cryptic Plants: Secrets of the Early Land Plants
Speaker: Dr Christine Cargill, Curator of Cryptogams, ANBG
Talk summary: Christine will discuss the origin of the group of land plants known collectively as the bryophytes, including mosses, liverworts and hornworts. This is believed to be one of the earliest groups of plants to adapt to life on land. What are the bryophytes and how have they evolved to thrive in the environments that they have colonised all over the world?