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DEPARTMENT OF BOTANY
The Plant Press
From The Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 4, October 2021.
A summer of grape escapes: A field work photo journal
Jun Wen recently completed two ‘Grape Escapes’—one collecting trip to the southeast United States (August 30 – September 10, 2021) with Sue Lutz, and the other collecting trip to Texas and western Louisiana (September 19-28, 2021) with her long-time collaborator Stefanie Ickert-Bond (University of Alaska, Fairbanks). Wen and her colleagues made important collections and observations throughout the southeast (especially South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Kentucky), as well as Texas and western Louisiana, targeting grapevines (Vitis, Vitaceae), hickories (Carya, Juglandaceae), and rattlebox (Crotalaria, Fabaceae).
While in Texas, Wen and Ickert-Bond visited the John Fairey Garden near Hempstead. Having a unique artistic design by its founder John Fairey, the Garden is a hidden treasure with extraordinary collections from Mexico. The collecting team enjoyed getting to know the Garden via an introduction from botanist Adam Black via FaceBook. The team was given a tour by Executive Director Randy Twaddle and horticultural botanist Wally Wilkins.
The two trips were among many recent grape escapes that Wen had led, setting a foundation to wrap up the taxonomic revision of North American grapes. The studies of Carya and Crotalaria are collaborative work with colleagues at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for DNA-based species identification assay development.
Wen and her colleagues found the field work hard but also fun and productive, doing what they love to do and to better document these economically important plant species. The targeted field work has led to the discovery of several key variations of the economically important plant lineages that are not preserved in herbarium collections. The summer collections have filled in many gaps of the current knowledge on grapes and hickories, demonstrating that the discovery phase of biodiversity science is far from over. Wen and her associates and collaborators will soon start to analyze the collections using genomic and morphological tools to try to better understand the evolutionary patterns and processes of the grape and hickory species. They will also integrate the evidence from herbarium work, field studies, and cutting-edge phylogenomic analyses to revise the taxonomy of both of these economically important plant groups.
