The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation announces establishment of the George H. M. Lawrence Memorial Fund, based at the Institute, as a permanent Fund to honor the memory of Dr. Lawrence (1910-1978), its founding Director.
The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation announces establishment of the George H. M. Lawrence Memorial Fund, based at the Institute, as a permanent Fund to honor the memory of Dr. Lawrence (1910-1978), its founding Director.
The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation has received a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to produce an international register accounting for both specialists and individual research projects in systematic botany.
While collecting plants for a survey of the vascular flora of the James River Gorge (a continuing study), this annual glandular-pubescent herb belonging to the Capparidaceae was found near Balcony Falls, on a gravelly flood plain between Snowden and Glasgow on the Bedford County side of the river.
In the spring of 1975, the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources entered into a cooperative agreement with The Nature Conservancy, a national non-profit conservation group, to develop an on-going inventory of the state’s natural diversity.
This is an excellent plant taxonomy workbook, done on an experimental mode, so that it is a series of projects done by the student. Nevertheless, the book has excellent summaries, lists, drawings, glossaries, etc. It follows Cronquist’s classification of the flowering plants, in that portion.
The third edition of Hardin’s well known General Biology text can be summarized by two words—bigger and better. But perhaps the more important comment is that Hardin’s books are not just about Biology; he writes as a person of the world, concerned about man and his effect on our planet. For the average college student, or, indeed, for the average person, Hardin’s book would be an education in itself, with many literature and philosophical citations, and/or assessments of man’s situation.
While botanizing the Gunpowder River Basin in Baltimore and Harford Counties, Maryland, several nonintrinsic species have been collected that merit special note as new constituents of the State flora. Distributional data are based on ranges cited by the major floras of the northeastern United States. Voucher specimens are deposited at the Towson State University Herbarium (BALT).
Four species of ants are the principal dispersers of Sanguinaria, Hepatica and Viola diaspores in the Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia. They are Aphaenogaster rudis, Formica subsericea, Myrmica punctiventris and Lasius alienus. Variation in methods of diaspore presentation and diaspore characteristics, except for size, are not significantly reflected by ant species preferences for diaspore types, or by the frequencies with which different diaspores are removed by different ant species. However, there is a tendency for larger ant species to take larger diaspores and vice versa. The lack of specificity of the ant-diaspore interaction buffers the interaction against spatial and temporal heterogeneity.
An extensive colony of Asplenium heterochroum was found growing on the 125 year old walls of the Yulee Sugar Mill, Yulee Sugar Mill State Historic Site, Homosassa, Citrus County, Florida. The extremely local and generally rare species normally grows on limestone rocks in woods or grottos and has never been recorded on man-made structures. It was found to be hexaploid (108 pairs at meiotic metaphase) and possessed fronds up to 37 cm in length (twice the stature of previously recorded North America collections).
Quantitative studies of 27 relatively undisturbed hardwood forests in the central Coastal Plain of Virginia reveal that Quercus alba, Fagus grandifolia, Liriodendron tulipifera, and Quercus falcata dominate most stands. Quercus alba, Q. falcata, and Liriodendron concerate in separate margins of a Bray-Curtis ordination, while Fagus lies between Q. alba and Liriodendron, and broadly overlaps both. Carya tomentosa, C. glabra, and C. cordiformis concentrate in the same area as Liriodendron, and Acer rubrum, never very important, concentrates in the same area as Quercus alba. These forests were structurally more like the Southern Mixed Hardwood Forests of the southeastern Costal Plain, where Fagus is important, than the Oak-Hickory Forests of the Virginia Piedmont, where Quercus coccinea, Q. rubra, Q. prinus, and Acer rubrum are important.