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Volume 14, No. 1
January - March 2000
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CHANTICLEER FOUNDATION FUNDS FNA

Flora of North America received the outstandingly good news in January that the Chanticleer Foundation had approved a major grant to the project to support production of the Flora volumes. The Foundation has committed $432,000 for this year, with the expectation of funding at that level for six years for a total of nearly $3 million.

The Chanticleer Foundation was established by Adolph Rosengarten, Jr. to provide the framework to develop and maintain his 31-acre estate, "Chanticleer," as a pleasure garden open to the public. Located in Wayne, Pennsylvania, on the Main Line outside Philadelphia, Chanticleer has become a garden of remarkable beauty. It was opened to the public in 1993 and has been featured in many books, magazines, and television programs on gardens and gardening. Flora of North America is very grateful to Chanticleer Garden director Christopher Woods, whose vision and leadership made this grant possible. This may be the first time that a foundation created to support a botanical garden has agreed to fund a major botanical research project in which it is not itself programmatically involved.

The grant will be administered by Nancy R. Morin, FNA southwest regional coordinator, executive director of the Arboretum at Flagstaff, and visiting associate professor in the biology department at Northern Arizona University (NAU). Funding from the Chanticleer Foundation will make it possible to hire sufficient staff at a number of editorial centers to continue the project and increase production significantly. An editorial center will be established in Flagstaff that will use facilities and expertise at both the Arboretum and NAU. It will focus on completion of maps for volumes 23 and 26, weed and conservation review, southwestern regional review, and editing of Volume 4.

In addition to supporting the Chanticleer Garden, the Chanticleer Foundation Board supports important local and regional horticultural activities and wished to support a horticultural and educational project of national and international significance. After several years of discussion between Morin and Woods, Flora of North America was selected to fulfill this goal. Many of the plants treated in this work are important horticulturally, while others are relatives of cultivated plants, have potential for ornamental horticulture, or contain genetic material that may be important in developing new horticultural varieties.

More information on Chanticleer can be found at http://www.chanticleergar
den.org
.

 

VOLUME 22

PUBLISHED!

Volume 22, the fourth volume of the Flora to appear, was published in March. The volume contains the "lower" monocots, including the Butomales (flowering rush order), Hydrocharitales (Canadian waterweed order), Najadales (arrowgrass order), Arecales (palm order), Arales (aroid order), Commelinales (in part; spiderwort order), Eriocaulales (eriocaul order), Juncales (rush order), Typhales (cattail order), Bromeliales (bromelia order), and Zingiberales (ginger order). A total of 30 families, 89 genera, and 423 species are treated. Volume 22 is available from Oxford University Press for $95. To order, visit their Web site at www.oup-usa.org. Orders can also be placed by phone at 1-800-451-7556; by fax at 919-677-1303; or by writing to Order Department, Oxford University Press, 2001 Evans Road, Cary NC 27513.

PRODUCTION SCHEDULE

The recent generous grant of $432,000 from the Chanticleer Foundation has ensured that the FNA project will continue for the year 2000. The Foundation is prepared to continue this level of funding each year over the following five years, for a total of approximately $3 million, on the single condition that two volumes of the Flora of North America be produced during each year of the grant period. Failure to produce two volumes in a single year will result in the loss of this funding.

This is not only a tremendous opportunity for FNA to move forward, but also a major incentive for all those committed to the volumes listed below to complete their treatments and editorial and review responsibilities as quickly as possible to insure continued funding.

On 18 March the Management Committee met with the director of the Chanticleer Foundation just outside Philadelphia to review the conditions of the grant and to determine the best way to apply the funds to achieve the goals set forth in the award and to prioritize work on the next several volumes. The sequence of production and schedule is presented below.

It is imperative that all treatments be delivered to the appropriate taxon editor on the date agreed upon by the taxon editor and author, and absolutely no later than the due date next to each volume. Authors responsible for treatments in the families below who cannot meet their deadlines should contact the taxon editor immediately to determine an appropriate course of action to insure on-time delivery of the manuscript.


The schedule of production for the next six years is:

2000 — Volume 22 (published March 2000)

2000 — Volume 26 (all treatments due immediately)

  • Agavaceae
  • Aloeaceae
  • Burmanniaceae
  • Dioscoreaceae
  • Haemodoraceae
  • Iridaceae
  • Liliaceae
  • Orchidaceae
  • Pontederiaceae
  • Smilacaceae
  • Stemonaceae

2001 — Volume 23 (all treatments due immediately)

  • Cyperaceae

2001 — Volume 4 (treatments due September 2000)

  • Achatocarpaceae
  • Aizoaceae
  • Amaranthaceae
  • Basellaceae
  • Cactaceae
  • Chenopodiaceae
  • Molluginaceae
  • Nyctaginaceae
  • Phytolaccaceae
  • Portulacaceae

2001 — Volume 24 (treatments due September 2000)

  • Poaceae (part 1)

2002 — Volume 5 (treatments due June 2001)

  • Caryophyllaceae
  • Plumbaginaceae
  • Polygonaceae

2002 — Volume 25 (treatments due June 2001)

  • Poaceae (part 2)

2003 — Volume 14 (treatments due June 2002)

  • Apocynaceae
  • Asclepiadaceae
  • Convolvulaceae
  • Cuscutaceae
  • Gentianaceae
  • Loganiaceae
  • Menyanthaceae
  • Solanaceae

2003 — Volume 6 (treatments due June 2002)

  • Begoniaceae
  • Bixaceae
  • Caricaceae
  • Cistaceae
  • Clusiaceae
  • Cucurbitaceae
  • Datiscaceae
  • Droseraceae
  • Elatinaceae
  • Flacourtiaceae
  • Fouquieriaceae
  • Loasaceae
  • Malvaceae
  • Paeoniaceae
  • Passifloraceae
  • Sarraceniaceae
  • Sterculiaceae
  • Tamaricaceae
  • Theaceae
  • Tiliaceae
  • Turneraceae
  • Violaceae

2004 — Volume 19 (treatments due June 2003)

  • Asteraceae (part 1)

2004 — Volume 20 (treatments due June 2003)

  • Asteraceae (part 2)

2005 — Volume 21 (treatments due June 2004)

  • Asteraceae (part 3)

2005 — Volume 7? (treatments due June 2004)

  • Brassicaceae
  • Capparaceae
  • Moringaceae
  • Resedaceae
  • Salicaceae

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

Herbaria Maps Available

Mary Barkworth has recently developed maps in ArcView showing the location of herbaria in the 48 contiguous states of the U.S. and southern provinces of Canada. Anyone who wishes to view the maps may do so at http://biology.usu.edu/herbarium/herbne.htm. Please note that if there are many herbaria in one town, only one will show on the map.

Topographic Maps of the U.S.

Topographic maps for the entire United States are available on-line for free at http://www.topozone.com/. They can be moved around to pinpoint specific locations, will give exact coordinates, and can be printed.

Addendum and Maps of Nunavut from BFNA

The Bryophyte Flora of North America project (FNA volumes 27_29) has issued an Addendum to the Guide for Contributors, which updates, simplifies, and clarifies the Guide. Important changes include modifications relating to illustration, chromosome numbers, regional review, conservation status, vernacular names, and author citations.

BFNA has also adapted an electronic map (in .tif format) including the new Canadian province of Nunavut. The map can be used with computer paint programs to submit geographic range information for mapping.

Both the Addendum and the map are available from Richard Zander, Lead Editor of BFNA. Anyone interested may contact him at rzander@sciencebuff.org.

Geographic Names Information System

The USGS hosts an up-look site (www-nmd.usgs.gov/www/gnis/gnisform.
html)
for rapidly locating places, named features, county names, populations, elevations, and topographic map names (USGS 7.5' x 7.5') in the United States and territories.


THE CHALLENGE AHEAD

John McNeill, Chair, FNA Management Committee

As many of you will already know, these are exciting times for FNA. Thanks to the good offices of Nancy Morin, director of the Arboretum at Flagstaff, Arizona, the project has received a committment to funding for six years of $432,000 per year from the Chanticleer Foundation (see "Chanticleer Foundation Funds FNA," page 1). There is a significant condition attached to the award, however: Chris Woods, Executive Director of the Chanticleer Foundation, informed the Management Committee on 18 March that he expected "two bound volumes in my hands on December 31." With four volumes published since 1993 and a previous target of only one volume each year, can we do it? I believe that we can.

My confidence comes from the fact that we have already put in place the organizational structure to avoid the bottlenecks that hampered progress in the 1990s, and to permit a great measure of "parallel processing."

In our grant application to NSF in the fall of 1998, under Barbara Thiers' chairmanship, we had started the process of developing centers in addition to the Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG) for production of individual volumes. Following the turndown of this NSF grant application (solely, I may say, because we had not met our own targets for producing volumes of the Flora), we not only re-emphasized this distributed model, we also became determined to streamline many aspects of production, most notably in terms of mapping and simplifying the editorial and review processes through greater use of the Web.

We were greatly supported in this new direction by a number of very positive developments last year: significant line-budget funding from the Hunt Institute to produce volumes 26 and then 5; agreements with Mary Barkworth, Utah State University, Logan, for integration of the Manual of Grasses with the Flora,

The Flora of North America (FNA) project is a cooperative program to produce a comprehensive account of the plants of North America north of Mexico. The FNA Newsletter, edited at the Hunt Institute and printed at the Missouri Botanical Garden, is published quarterly by the Flora of North American Association to communicate news about the FNA project and other topics of interest to North American floristic researchers. For more information, please see the FNA Web site, http://hua.huh.harvard.
edu/FNA

Readers are invited to send appropriate news items to:
Elizabeth A. Polen, Newsletter Editor
Flora of North America
Hunt Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890 Items can also be sent by e-mail to: kiser@andrew.cmu.edu.

and with John Kartesz, Director of the Biota of North America Program (BONAP) to provide a phytogeography center for FNA; and the acceptance of the post of Executive Director of the FNA project by Dave Boufford, Harvard University. With continued financial support from MBG and infrastructure support at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT), the project was well set up, without further major financial support to complete the remaining four monocotyledon volumes and at least two covering dicotyledons. Meanwhile, the Bryophyte Flora of North America was being prosecuted vigorously at two centers—the electronic databasing under the direction of Barbara Thiers at the New York Botanical Garden, and the editing of the "hardcopy" version under the leadership of Richard Zander at the Buffalo Museum of Science.

Reflecting these changes, a new management structure for FNA was put in place. The Management Committee now consists of a representative from each of the operational centers, along with the Executive Director and three members elected by the Editorial Committee, in part to represent broader Flora interests.

In summary, FNA is very fortunate to have the structures in place to move immediately into a high-activity mode that will achieve a level of productivity that we have never hitherto seriously envisaged. At its meeting on 18 March, the Management Committee set out a timetable for publication of volumes over the next three years and identified the priorities for expenditure of this year's funds from the Chanticleer Foundation to best achieve these publication goals (see "Production Schedule," page 1). One immediate and delightful benefit is the establishment of a new Editorial Center under the leadership of Nancy Morin at The Arboretum at Flagstaff, in association with Northern Arizona University. This center is committed to publication of Volume 4 in 2001.

Finally, what does this good news mean for you, the readership of the FNA Newsletter? Most of you are involved with the Flora in one way or another, whether as current or prospective authors, reviewers, editors, or advisors. Whatever your involvement and particularly your commitments, you can take it that they have, almost overnight, become very real and very time-sensitive. We all know that there were times when pressure of other work on limited staff at "FNA Central" meant that deadlines could be ignored as unrealistic. These times are over. "Two bound volumes on my desk by December 31" means that work for FNA has to be seen as real commitment. Consequently, it may be that some will have to reassess their existing commitments. We hope that this will not be necessary, but we would rather work on alternative arrangements some time ahead of our very real deadlines than have to do so once deadlines have been missed. But think of it, journals have been launched to "expedite botanical publication"; now for rapid publication, just contribute to the Flora of North America.


CENTERS

Intermountain Herbarium, USU

There was a poster presentation on "The Manual of Grasses for North America: Current Status and Prognosis" at the annual meeting of the Society for Range Management on 16 February, and also at the Northwest Scientific Association's annual meeting on 16_20 March. Comments concerning the content and detail in the sample treatment of Melica were quite favorable.

Harvard University Herbaria

The FNA ftp site at the Harvard University Herbaria has gone live since the last issue of the newsletter. As anticipated, some users have experienced difficulties, but most have been able to move manuscripts back and forth among taxon editors, regional coordinators, and reviewers without difficulties. We will continue to improve the ftp site and to work with users who experience difficulties. For help, please send messages with a description of the difficulties encountered to Hong Song (song@mobot.org).

Hong Song continues to work with the FNA Web site and to add treatments as they become available. Once the author and taxon editor have agreed that a treatment is acceptable, it is made available on the Web.

To bypass the FNA introductory pages and go directly to the taxonomic treatments, use the URL http://hua.huh.harvard.edu. Remember to use the wild card "%" when searching. For example, to find the species of Aristolochia in Florida, enter Aristolochia% on the "Name" line and select Florida from the pop-up menu in the "Province/State" field.

Those who compare the recently published Volume 22 with the treatments on the FNA Web pages will notice that the Web version is not as current as the published volume. This is the result of changes made between the time the manuscript was sent to the publisher (and posted on the Web) and when it was published. We intend to correct this problem with future volumes so that the most current treatment will always be available on-line.

Hunt Institute

FNA and other Institute staff met several times before and after the holidays to complete a draft of new front-end pages for the revamped FNA Web site. These changes to structure, content, and design will be reviewed by the Management Committee, and the new site should be in place later this spring. Meanwhile, 45 family and generic treatments for Volume 26 were processed for review, sent to reviewers, and placed on the ftp site.

DEATHS

WILLIAM G. D'ARCY, Senior Curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden, died of cancer 16 December 1999.

Dr. D'Arcy was born 29 August 1931 in Calgary, Canada, and graduated with honors in political economy from the University of Alberta in 1954. Between 1960 and 1966, he owned and managed a soft-drink bottling factory in Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, where he kindled an interest in the local flora. Encouraged by several botanists, he decided to change careers. Dr. D'Arcy enrolled in the botany master's program at the University of Florida, working with Dan Ward. His thesis treated the taxonomy of Solanum in Florida. In 1968, he was recruited for the Ph.D. program at Washington University and the Missouri Botanical Garden, where he worked under Walter Lewis. He became involved in the Flora of Panama program and wrote his thesis on the Solanaceae of Panama. He received his degree in 1972 and, at age 41, began his career as a research botanist at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

While at Missouri, Dr. D'Arcy worked on the Flora of Panama, and he organized a symposium in Panama in 1981 to commemorate its completion. He compiled the first computerized database for this (or any) large flora using software he wrote himself, since it was before the era of readily available technology.

During the 1980s he gained recognition for his expertise on the Solanaceae, and he published prolifically in the family in both floristic and monographic studies. He participated in at least 40 collecting expeditions to Canada, tropical America, Africa, Madagascar, and China. He enjoyed regular interaction with both colleagues and students.

Toward the end of his career, he took responsibility for completing some of the Bignoniaceae projects of the late Alwyn Gentry, who had accumulated large unfinished manuscripts and numerous specimens of that family. Students of the North American flora will be interested in his treatments of various genera such as Leucophysalis and Solanum, and of the Ozark flora.

Dr. D'Arcy is survived by his wife, Nancy, and two daughters, Charlotte and Lorraine. The Missouri Botanical Garden is planning a memorial volume of contributed papers to be published in the Monographs series. It will include an extended biography and list of his publications.

ROBERT K. GODFREY, professor emeritus at Florida State University, died in Tallahassee on 6 February 2000 at the age of 88.

A graduate of Harvard and WWII veteran, Dr. Godfrey taught for several years at North Carolina State University and completed his doctorate at Duke University. In 1954 he joined the faculty of the Department of Biological Sciences at FSU, where he was largely responsible for the development and curation of the herbarium. He retired in 1974.

Known for his generosity, hospitality, and irreverent wit, Dr. Godfrey remained an active contributor to the field after his retirement from FSU. He continued to make frequent and sometimes sudden field trips with colleagues and students for many years.

Dr. Godfrey's book, Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Northern Florida and Adjacent Georgia and Alabama, was published in 1988.

G. LEDYARD STEBBINS, born 6 January 1906 in Lawrence, New York, evolutionary biologist and prominent botanist, died on 19 January 2000 at the age of 94.

Professor Stebbins was the pioneer of evolutionary synthesis, incorporating Darwin's theories into existing knowledge of the evolutionary history of organisms. His development of evolutionary botany revolutionized the study of plants.

As a student at Harvard University, Professor Stebbins studied under Merritt Lyndon, editor of Gray's Manual of Botany, and graduated with a master's degree in botany. He later became a professor at Colgate University, University of California at Berkeley, and eventually settled at UC Davis.

He was president of the California Native Plant Society in 1967 and was influential in the conservation of native plants and habitats, including preventing the destruction of a raised beach on Monterey Peninsula, now called the S.F.B. Morse Botanical Area.

Professor Stebbins received a number of distinguished awards, including the National Medal of Science, the Gold Medal of the Linnaean Society of London, the Verill Medal, and the Lewis Prize. The Cold Canyon Reserve at UC Davis was renamed the Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve in 1980.


PUBLICATIONS

Flora of Missouri Now Available

Steyermark's Flora of Missouri, Revised Edition, Volume 1, by George Yatskievych. Published 1999 by the Missouri Department of Conservation and the Missouri Botanical Garden. xii, 991 pp., hardcover. ISBN 1-887247-19-X. $38.00 + handling, available from MBG Press; http://www.mobot.org; 314- 577-9534; P.O. Box 299, St. Louis, MO 63166.

Originally published in 1963, the late Julian Steyermark's Flora of Missouri has been the principal reference on plant life in the state. It also has been widely used in surrounding regions and has served as a model for floristic manuals in the United States. Although out of print and in serious need of revision, it has continued to be an essential tool for land managers, conservationists, ecologists, taxonomists, foresters, wildlife biologists, and other students of Missouri's diverse flora. In 1987, in recognition of the need for an up-to-date reference on the state's flora, the Missouri Department of Conservation and the Missouri Botanical Garden entered into an agreement to jointly sponsor the production of a thoroughly revised manual. This volume is the first of two that are intended to fulfill this promise.

Steyermark's Flora of Missouri is an account of Missouri's vascular flora, including the pteridophytes, gymnosperms, and flowering plants growing spontaneously in the state. Volume 1 contains treatments of 802 species of ferns, fern allies, conifers, and monocots. Users of the previous edition will note similarities in format, with keys to families, genera, species, and intraspecific taxa; full-page plates of line drawings; and county dot maps for each species. However, the revised edition features all-new illustrations and simplified maps generated from a computerized database of specimens. The keys have been streamlined and morphological descriptions have been added to the text. Taxonomic changes and additions are documented in a lengthy bibliography.

To make it more useful as a textbook and to provide additional information for those just beginning the study of Missouri's flora, Volume 1 also includes a series of introductory chapters that summarize the state's climate, geology,

vegetation, and flora, as well as changes since publication of the first edition. A history of floristic botany in Missouri commemorates the numerous men and women who have contributed to knowledge of the state's flora. A glossary and a "How to" section complete the background materials in the book.

Steyermark's Flora of Missouri is intended to serve as a reference tool for both professionals in biology and related fields and to the large group of dedicated amateur botanists and naturalists who have created the unique environment in which conservation, natural history, and other outdoor activities thrive and are supported in the state.

Icones Orchidacearum Peruviarum Available
The third installment of Icones Orchidacearum Peruviarum (IOP) is now available, illustrating an additional 200 orchid species of Peru. The Icones is issued as loose-leaf pages for intercalation according to the user's preference or as two paper-bound fascicles with perfect binding. One side of each page has a full-page botanical line drawing; the other side includes place of publication, synonymy, a detailed description, known distribution, voucher specimens, observations on identification, comments on taxonomic questions, habitat, and flowering season. The major genera treated in this installment include Epidendrum, Maxillaria, Castasetum, and Oncidium. A total of 29 species and one subspecies are newly described. Copies of IOP, each containing 200 plates, are available for $65_$75. For more information, contact Aurora de Bennett, c/o Eric A. Christenson, 1646 Oak Street, Sarasota FL 34236.

CORRECTIONS

In the July_December 1999 issue (Volume 13, Numbers 3_4), the FNA Newsletter reported that The Manual of North American Grasses would contain vegetative keys. The article should have read that the Manual will not contain vegetative keys, due to the considerable expense of developing them.

The Editorial Center for Bryophytes is BUF; NYBG is the Bryophyte Data Center.


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