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BEN # 208 - Dr. W.A. Weber Festschrift - Part II
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No. 208 November 19, 1998
aceska@victoria.tc.ca Victoria, B.C.
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Dr. A. Ceska, P.O.Box 8546, Victoria, B.C. Canada V8W 3S2
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BEN # 207, 208, and 209 are dedicated to
the doyen of Colorado botany
DR. WILLIAM ALFRED (BILL) WEBER
on the occasion of his 80th birthday, November 16, 1998.
ART KRUCKEBERG DOES A TURKEY TROT
From: Arthur Kruckeberg <ark@u.washington.edu>
Our month in Turkey this past summer, courtesy the National
Science Foundation focussed on the many serpentine outcrops
there. We were especially keen on finding serpentine plants that
accumulate high levels of nickel (tissue with >1000 ppm Ni,
called hyperaccumulators). Serpentine exposures near Ankara and
in the lofty Taurus Mountains to the south of Ankara are rich in
narrow endemics; most species of Alyssum (Brassicaceae) proved
to be hyperaccumulators, via our simple field test for nickel
[see BEN # 143]. Our field party, Dr. Roger Reeves of Massey
University, New Zealand, three Turkish botanists, and ARK, did
find time to enjoy Turkish beer, their ever-present watermelons
and Turkish tea and coffee. We took time off from plant hunting
to visit the amazing tuff formations in Cappadocia and the
ancient subterranean "cities" dug into the volcanic tuff.
Turkish flora, geology, landscapes and the friendly people all
were delightful.
Bill Weber, my friend, you would have revelled in the geobotani-
cal richness of Turkey, especially the subalpine/alpine flora of
the Taurus Mountains...the Rockies of Turkey. I'll bet Turkey
has even more locoweeds than Colorado!
SOME NOTES ON PAPAVER
From: David F. Murray <ffdfm@uaf.edu>
I have just returned from Oslo where I spent five weeks at the
Center for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy. Norwegian
colleagues Inger Nordal and Reidar Elven, University of Oslo,
had agreed to take on leadership of the Panarctic Flora Project,
and they obtained funds to support a Panarctic Year at the
Center. The year was kicked off in late September with a small
symposium to discuss the species concept. Since our proximate
goal is to complete a checklist of arctic vascular plants, it is
imperative we reconcile the different taxonomic traditions of
participating countries and create a panarctic synthesis.
After the symposium and throughout the rest of the year, working
groups will be assembled in Oslo to work intensively on certain
genera. Papaver is one of those. Following the symposium we
looked at the scapose taxa of what most people still call the
Scapiflorae (section Meconella). To accomplish the panarctic
view, we looked together at specimens, including types, with key
references close at hand. Important questions were: are we
recognizing the same taxa; are we applying the same names, and
if not why not?
The "we" of the poppy working group consisted of the following.
Inger Nordal and Reidar Elven, and Heidi Solstad who had just
completed an M.Sc. with them, brought to the table a lot of
experience and recent research on breeding systems and isozyme
variation for the North Atlantic region. Vladik Petrovsky had
worked with I. A. Tolmachev on the treatment of poppies in
Arctic Flora USSR and had himself named new taxa from north-
eastern Asia. Moreover, with his wife, Paulina Zhukova, he had
reported chromosome numbers, important reference points, for
many of those taxa. Orjan Nilsson, who has completed a treatment
of poppies for Flora Nordica, provided another Scandinavian
perspective. I was there to represent the North American ex-
perience gained during my struggle to produce the FNA treatment.
What I am reporting here draws from our discussions.
To be certain we were all on the same page, as the saying goes,
we first developed a character list, which was an interesting
exercise. After some testing and refinements, this will be come
the basis for a morphological reassessment of taxa with our
individual biases removed.
In my contribution to the treatment of Papaver with Bob Kiger in
Flora of North America, some points were clearly left un-
resolved. One was the question of what to call the plant of the
high arctic latitudes that I had named P. radicatum subsp.
polare. The similarity of our plants, and those of arctic Rus-
sia, to the Svalbard P. dahlianum is clear. What was ambiguous
was the relationship between the plants on Svalbard and the type
specimen for name P. dahlianum from Finmark, northern Norway.
Due to my very limited experience with the Norwegian plants, I
was unsure the Finmark and Svalbard plants were really the same
taxon. Now, it is clear from what I saw in Oslo they are indeed
the same and P. dahlianum is the name we should apply to our
plants. Having answered that question, another was raised. Does
P. gorodkovii belong with P. dahlianum as well?
There is still the question of what is P. radicatum? The techni-
cal problems of typification will be "solved" by others shortly.
The view from the North Atlantic has been rather narrow,
reflecting the legacy of Gunvor Knaben, who applied the name
only to plants of Iceland, Norway, and Svalbard with a
chromosome number of 2n=70. All plants having 2n=56 she called
P. lapponicum. Yet, it has been clear to us in the North
American that all our taxa simply cannot not be lumped in that
species. There is P. lapponicum and another complex of forms
that I placed in P. radicatum. It is obvious that species of
Papaver cannot be defined by one chromosome number; indeed even
two or three ploidy levels are reported for some morphological-
geographical entities. So, either we expand our concept of P.
radicatum to include the 2n=42 and 56 chromosome taxa or we have
to find another name for our material.
Knaben's work at the Botanical Garden in Oslo demonstrated that
species of poppy could be crossed, despite big differences in
ploidy level, and we must conclude that hybridization plays a
role in creating the myriad forms one sees in a large series of
specimens. On the other hand, Inger Nordal and her students have
now shown that poppies are not only self-compatible but also
have flowers structured in such ways as to make them essentially
autogamous, at least early in the season, before the flowers
open. She has, therefore, supplied an explanation for the pat-
tern of variability we see--more variation among populations
than within them. Occasional hybridization produces new, local
variation , and these variants are maintained by selfing. There-
fore our species concept and circumscriptions must take the
breeding system into account.
We are establishing a living collection of poppies at the
University of Oslo. Reidar Elven will be participating in the
Swedish arctic expedition --Tundra Northwest 1999--this summer
and will collect material from the Canadian Arctic to supplement
what they already have from Svalbard and Finmark and what I have
sent from Alaska.
BRACHYTHECIUM CALCAREUM KINDB. IN THE INTERIOR PACIFIC NORTHWEST
From: Toby Spribille <Spribille_Toby/r1_kootenai@fs.fed.us>
In the past several years I have been collecting and comparing
Brachythecium samples wherever I go in the hopes of gaining a
picture of this difficult genus. Of all of the mosses, the genus
Brachythecium may be the most commonly encountered in the inte-
rior. In almost every forest stand, every streambed and seep,
every roadside and every alpine meadow, one encounters
Brachythecium, and oftentimes two or three species. In doing
forest vegetation plots, I am constantly faced with the question
of what species I have, and in some cases I find six species in
a single 100 m square plot. Nonetheless, the experience has been
enlightening, and morphological and autecological patterns have
become quite clear.
One of the more significant discoveries in the course of the
Brachythecium study centres around a julaceous, straw-coloured
species which grows in ditches along country roads and highways,
on disturbed soil in forests, and in old cutblocks. Its occur-
rence is almost predictable in these habitats and once known is
easy to recognize. My early attempts at keying the moss put it
in Brachythecium salebrosum, though when sterile, it seemed to
key to B. albicans, and this is the name that the material seems
to carry in herbaria. Two summers ago a German phytosociologist
I was working with, Hans-Georg Stroh, pointed out to me that
this moss, which I had come to call B. albicans, did not at all
look like B. albicans as he knew it in Europe. This sparked my
interest, and I compared the moss closely with descriptions of
B. albicans in European floras. It became difficult to fit our
plants into the concept of B. albicans. In particular, our
material is autoicous, and fruits often, B. albicans is
dioicous, and fruits rarely. Our material has weakly decurrent
leaf margins, B. albicans has strongly decurrent leaf margins.
In these and other finer points, our plants were something quite
different than B. albicans, and this was reinforced when I found
material in dry forests which actually fit the description of B.
albicans very nicely.
Perusal of Robinson's (1962) key to North American Brachythecium
placed the material very tidily in Brachythecium calcareum, a
species described by in 1895 by Kindberg from Ontario, and
subsequently reported from Newfoundland and Alaska (Crum &
Anderson 1981) and Colorado (Weber & Wittmann 1992). Unsure, I
sent a piece to Robinson, who confirmed my suspicion. New to
Montana and the Pacific Northwest, I was subsequently able to
find the species in its predictable roadside habitat in Idaho,
Washington and British Columbia. It has become evident that
Brachythecium calcareum is one of the most common ruderal
species of the genus in the interior Pacific Northwest, and may,
in fact, have its primary distribution here.
Selected specimens (collection numbers are those of the author
and are housed in the Forest Service Fortine District Herbarium
in Fortine, Montana, unless otherwise indicated): CANADA,
BRITISH COLUMBIA. Southern interior, Creston Valley, West Cres-
ton Road, 7714; U.S.A., IDAHO. Bonner Co., Priest River region,
Hager Lake, 6668; MONTANA. Flathead Co., Columbia Falls, North
Fork Road, 1608 (US, !Robinson); Lake Co., Swan Valley, near
Point Pleasant Campground, 6625; Lincoln Co., Murphy Lake, 6583;
Sanders Co., Vermilion River at Bear Creek, 7516-A; WASHINGTON.
Pend Oreille Co., Frater Lake, 7680 (WTU).
References:
Crum, H.A. & L.E. Anderson 1981. Mosses of Eastern North
America. Columbia University Press, New York.
Robinson, H. 1962. Generic revisions of North American
Brachytheciaceae. Bryologist 65(1): 73-145.
Weber, W.A. & R.C. Wittmann. 1992. Catalog of the Colorado
Flora: a biodiversity baseline. University Press of Colorado
Press, Boulder.
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