| New collaborating scientists from Turkey and Spain |
| Jul 2012 |
| Patricia Barbera from the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid just started collaborating building the content for species web pages of several Euphorbia of Northern Africa. We also welcome Aysun Patterson and Onur Yanar, two graduate students from Istanbul University, who have recently joined our project network. |
| Ya Yang, one of the graduate students associated with the Euphorbia PBI team, just got her Ph.D. degree! |
| 12 Dec 2011 |
| Dr. Ya Yang was working on Subgenus Chamaesyce for her dissertaion project under the supervision of Prof. Paul Berry at the University of Michigan. The title of her dissertation is "Phylogenetics of Euphorbia subgenus Chamaesyce: reticulate history, evolution of diverse photosynthetic systems, and radiation in the Hawaiian Islands". |
| 28th Succulent Plants Symposium, Huntington Botanical Gardens, California |
| 3 Sep 2011 |
| Brian Dorsey, one of our graduate students working on Euphorbia at the University of Michigan, participated in this interesting symposium aimed to succulent plant growers, collectors and the general public. The title of Brian's talk was "Systematics of the xerophytic and succulent Euphorbia". |
| Three new publications on Euphorbia by our students and collaborators |
| Aug-Sep 2011 |
Yang, Y., and Berry, P.E. 2011. Phylogenetics of the Chamaesyce Clade (Euphorbia, Euphorbiaceae): Reticulate evolution and long-distance dispersal in a prominent C4 lineage. American Journal of Botany 98: 1486-1503.
Geltman, D., Berry, P.E., Riina, R., and Peirson, J. 2011. Typification and synonymy of the species of Euphorbia subgenus Esula native to the United States and Canada. J. Bot. Res. Inst. Texas 5: 143-151.
Pahlevani, A. and Riina, R. 2011. A synopsis of Euphorbia Subgen. Chamaesyce Raf. (Euphorbiaceae) in Iran. Ann. Bot. Fennici 48: 304-316. |
| Two publications on Euphorbia subgenus Esula by our PBI collaborators in Europe. |
| Jun-Jul 2011 |
Barres, L., Vilatersana, R., Molero, J., Susanna, A., and Galbany-Casals, M. 2011. Molecular phylogeny of Euphorbia subgen. Esula sect. Aphyllis (Euphorbiaceae) inferred from nrDNA and cpDNA markers. Taxon 60, 705-720.
Frajman B., Schonswetter, P. 2011. Giants and dwarfs: Molecular phylogenies reveal multiple origins of annual spurges within Euphorbia subg. Esula. Mol Phylogenet Evol. 61: 413-424. |
| A new publication on cyathium development. |
| Jan 2011 |
| "Is LEAFY a useful marker gene for the flower-inflorescence boundary in the Euphorbia cyathium?", G. Prenner, I. Cacho D. Baum and P. Rudall ask this question in a research paper just published in the Journal of Experimental Botany, Vol. 62(1). Kudos to our collaborators for this new contribution to the understanding of the complex inflorescence of Euphorbia. |
| A taxonomic revision of the genus Euphorbia in India! |
| Jan 2011 |
| This new book, "The genus Euphorbia L. (Euphorbiaceae) in India - A taxonomic revision" (Dec 2010) is a more than welcome publication, since India is an important center of diversity for Euphorbia, with an interesting assemblage of lineages and several endemisms. The authors, M.S. Binojkumar and N.P. Balakrishnan, have kindly agreed to collaborate with our project as editors and contributors for the taxon web pages of the Indian centered species of Euphorbia. |
| A new Masters student, Keeley Briggs, joins our PBI team at the University of Michigan. |
| Jan 2011 |
| Keeley is interested in museums and collections and she will be working at the MICH herbarium gaining experience through her involvement in different PBI activities related to our Euphorbia collections at MICH and helping with the organization of digital collections and literature (protologues) data which will be part of our digital monograph of Euphorbia. |
| Euphorbiaceae types will be digitized at the Geneva herbarium (G). |
| Dec 2010 |
| The first week of December 2010 Ricarda Riina worked at the Geneva herbarium (G) examining Euphorbia types. During that visit she learned that the family Euphorbiaceae was among the group of families selected for the Geneva type specimens digitization project. This is very important for our PBI project because this herbarium hosts one of the richest Euphorbiaceae collections in the world, including numerous types and historical collections. |
| Subgenus Esula working group
meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the end of October. |
| Oct-Nov 2010 |
| Dmitry Geltman and Ricarda Riina will spend a
month in Ann Arbor working closely with Paul Berry and Jess Peirson
on several subprojects related to our work on the phylogenetics and
taxonomy of the leafy spurges ( Subgenus Esula). |
| Euphorbia symposium at the XVIII International Botanical
Congress (IBC) next year. |
| Sep 2010 |
| There will be a symposium dedicated to recent
studies on the genus Euphorbia at IBC, and several of our
collaborators and students are planning to attend and give talks
about their research. The congress will be held in Melbourne,
Australia, 23-30 July 2011. The deadline to submit abstracts that
could be considered for the Euphorbia symposium is Oct 31
2010. |
| A new name for UNIN: The "Larry Leach
Herbarium". |
| Sep 2010 |
 The Herbarium UNIN at the University of
Limpopo in South Africa has now been officially named the Larry
Leach Herbarium. This herbarium hosts a very important collection of
southern African Euphorbia, most of them collected by Larry
Leach himself. In addition to some 600 specimens collected by Leach,
the collection also consists of close to a thousand samples in the
spirit collection, hundreds of photographs and volumes of Leach's
personal (hand-written) field notes and taxonomical observations.
For more information contact Rolf Becker at rbecker@mweb.co.za or have a look at the August issue of the journal Euphorbia World where our collaborators Rolf Becker and Alma Moller have an article developing this story with additional details on Larry Leach's contribution to the knowledge of the flora of South Africa. |
| Evelyn Roe, a new collaborator working
in Zambia. |
| Sep 2010 |
| Evelyn Roe, a field botanist and ecologist,
has recently started to do some fieldwork for our project in Zambia.
Specifically she is interested in collecting and documenting
Euphorbia species occurring around the Victoria Falls area
and in the Kalahari Sands vegetation. We hope to have some reports
from her fieldtrips pretty
soon. |
| Jess Peirson, a new postdoc, joins our
team in the Berry lab. |
| Jun 2010 |
| Jess will be based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and
will be working on multiple aspects of the PBI project, including
work on the Flora of North America treatments, collaboration with
the phylogenetics of Subgenus Esula subproject, labwork, and
building the content for selected taxon web
pages. |
| Upcoming conferences: Spain and the
USA. |
| May 2010 |
| Barcelona, Spain, Jun 7-9:
Paul Berry and Laia Barres will participate in the "II Catalan
Conference on Flora Conservation", held at the Jardín Botánico de
Barcelona. Paul will give a presentation about relevant aspects of
the PBI Euphorbia project in relation to plant conservation.
Laia will talk about her studies on the genetic diversity of
Euphorbia margalidiana, a species endemic to the
Balearic Islands. Following the conference P. Berry, J. Molero, and
R. Riina will visit different localities of the Pyrenees to look for
several endemic euphorbias. After that P. Berry and R. Riina will be
working at the MA herbarium in Madrid for another week. |
| Botany 2010, Providence,
Rhode Island, Jul 31-Aug 4: Several of our students and
collaborators will be presenting results from their research on
Euphorbia at the Botanical Society of America conference this
Summer. Follow the links on each presenter's name to preview
abstracts: Horn,
Steinmann,
Dorsey,
Morawetz,
Faboyede,
Jin.
|
| Dmitry Geltman continues with his
research on Boissier types. |
| May 2010 |
| Dmitry will be visiting the Paris herbarium
(P) in mid June to continue his revision of Boissier Euphorbia
types. Besides his herbarium work, Dmitry will be taking a short
field trip to Fontainebleau (France) where a rare Euphorbia,
closely related to E. Esula, occurs. He is also planning a
field trip to Central Asia for this summer shortly after this visit
to France. |
| New initiatives from South Africa. |
| May 2010 |
| Rolf Becker and Alma Moller have been invited
to do the genus Euphorbia for the "Flora of the Eastern
Cape". They are also contributing with a field guide project for the
Succulents of South Africa, providing wonderful photos of
Euphorbia species from the numerous field trips they have
conducted all over the country.
|
| Two new publications on Euphorbia
from the New World. |
| Apr 2010 |
| Ivalu; Cacho, a
former graduate student of our PBI group, recently published part of
her doctoral dissertation. Her article is entitle "Are spurred
cyathia a key innovation? Molecular systematics and trait evolution
in the slipper spurges (Pedilanthus clade)" (American
Journal of Botany 97(3): 493-510. 2010.). |
| Mark Mayfield and
Victor Steinmann described a new species
from Mexico (E. spellenbergiana in Subgenus
Chamaesyce). Their work was published in Acta Botanica
Mexicana 90: 43-50. 2010. |
| Dmitry Geltman attended symposium in
Moscow, Russia. |
| Apr 2010 |
| Our collaborator D. Geltman participated in
the XII Moscow Plant Phylogeny Symposium dedicated to the 250th
anniversary of Professor Georg Franz Hoffmann, Mar 2010, where he
presented preliminary results from his research on Phylogenetic
relationships between Eurasian and North American species of
Euphorbia subgenus Esula (Euphorbiaceae). |
| Meeting in Paris - Subgenus
Euphorbia working group. |
| Mar 2010 |
| Thomas Haevermans, Paul Berry, and graduate
students Xavier Aubriot and Brian Dorsey met in Paris the first week
of March. They discussed issues related to their work on
phylogenetics of Subgenus Euphorbia, Madagascan Euphorbias,
and the status of the students dissertation projects. |
| Inventoring Euphorbia: recent
collecting trips. |
| Mar 2010 |
| Plant collecting work by our collaborators has
been done recently in Madagascar, Seychelles and Mauritius, Mexico,
Cape Verde, and South America (Peru, Chile, and Argentina). Check
the Fieldwork page for further
details. |
| Jeff J. Morawetz moved to Rancho Santa
Ana Botanic Garden, California. |
| Jan 2010 |
| Former PBI postdoc Jeff J. Morawetz moved to
California to start a new postdoc experience at Rancho Santana
Botanic Garden. Jeff will be working on a different plant group as
his main research subject (his beloved Orobanchs!), however, he will
continue collaborating with our Euphorbia project on
different fronts. |
| A new publication on Euphorbia
subgenus Lacanthis. |
| Dec 2009 |
| This publication by Haevermans and
collaborators is the first step towards the taxonomic revision of a
very difficult group of Euphorbia: the Malagasy relatives of the
Crown-of-Thorns (Euphorbia milii) group. For more information
see: Haevermans T., Rouhan G., Hetterscheid W., Teissier M., Belarbi
K., Aubriot X. & Labat J.-N. 2009. Chaos revisited: nomenclature
and typification of the Malagasy endemic Euphorbia subgenus
Lacanthis (Raf.) M.G.Gilbert. Adansonia, ser. 3, 31 (2) :
279-299. |
| Euphorbia Seed Atlas launched! |
| Dec 2009 |
| A new publication series documenting seed
diversity in Euphorbia ("Euphorbia Seed Atlas") was
recently launched. The first installment was published in the
December 2009 issue of Euphorbia World (vol. 5, #3, pages 26-29),
which included a page of introductory text and the first 3 seed
plates. Be sure to check out future issues of Euphorbia World
to see the upcoming installments of the Euphorbia Seed Atlas!
|
| Tackling the Malesian Euphorbias. |
| Oct 2009 |
| Hajo Esser, our collaborator from the Munich
herbarium, visited the Leiden herbarium as part of his contribution
in revising the Euphorbia occurring in Malesia (i.e.: SE Asia
excluding Indochine). Euphorbia has never been revised for
Malesia, so we are looking forward to this important contribution.
|
| Dmitry Geltman second visit to the USA
in 2009. |
| Sep-Oct 2009 |
| Our collaborator Dmitry Geltman from the
Komarov Institute (Russia) came to the United States in the Fall of
2009. This was his second visit to USA since the PBI project
started, and he visited several herbaria, including: A, GH, KSC,
MICH, MO, and NY. Dmitry worked on an annotated list of subgenus
Esula native to North America, which is now the base for the
Flora of North America treatments for the subgenus. Geltman is also
preparing a paper about the status of E. esula and E.
virgata in North America as a result of this visit. |
| One of the graduate students in the PBI
project successfully defended her PhD thesis! |
| Aug 2009 |
| Ivalu Cacho, from the Botany Department of the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, successfully defended her thesis on
Systematics of the Slipper-Spurges (Pedilanthus clade -
Euphorbia). Ivalu's thesis covered aspects of the molecular
systematics and trait evolution in the Slipper-Spurges and she was
also testing a ring-species hypothesis in a Caribbean
Euphorbia species-complex. Her advisor was Prof. David
Baum. |
| A group of Euphorbia PBI collaborators
met at the Botany & Mycology Conference in Snowbird, Utah,
USA. |
| Jul 2009 |
| Paul Berry, Nico Cellinese, Mark Mayfield,
James Horn, Jeff Morawetz, Ben van Ee, Ya Yang, and Ivalu Cacho
gathered in Snowbird to talk about different aspects of the project
and future directions. Several PBI collaborators and graduate
students gave talks or presented posters about their research on
Euphorbia. See the Botany & Mycology
2009 website and search abstracts containing the key word
Euphorbia (five abstracts). Our bioinformatics expert Nico Cellinese
also presented the most recent developments of our web data base
TOLKIN. |
| Dmitry Geltman visited other PBI
collaborators in the USA. |
| Apr-May 2009 |
| Our collaborator Dmitry Geltman from the
Komarov Institute (Russia) just finished a very productive visit to
the USA where he met with Paul Berry, and members of the Berry lab.
Dmitry also visited and worked with our collaborator Mark Mayfield
at Kansas State University. Two graduate students interested in
Euphorbia of North America, Jin Wenchi (Berry lab) and Angela
Post (Doyle lab at Cornell), went in the field on a separate trip
with Dmitry and Paul. They covered several west and midwest states
searching for populations of the invasive Euphorbia esula and
other invasive and native species of subgenus Esula. |
| New collaborators, students, and
postdocs. |
| Apr 2009 |
| We are pleased to welcome new participants in
the Euphorbia PBI project. New PhD students in the project
are: Jin Wenchi, Angela Post, and Yasaman Salmaki. We also have a
new postdoc, Pablo Carrillo-Reyes, working on the taxonomic revision
of Euphorbia sect. Portulacastrum under the
supervision of Victor Steinmann. Finally, several collaborating
scientists have joined us: Inês Cordeiro and Maria Biatriz Caruzo
from the Instituo de Botanica de Sao Paulo (Brazil), Shahin Zarre
from the University of Tehran (Iran), and Emily Wabuyele from the
East African Herbarium (Kenya). Visit our Participants page for more information
about these new collaborators. |
| Inventoring Euphorbia: first
collecting trips of 2009. |
| Apr 2009 |
| Field work is a central part of our project
and the first part of 2009 has been very productive. So far, this
year our collaborators have worked in Brazil, Madagascar, Kenya,
Tanzania, and the USA. If you want to read more about some of these
trips, and see where else our PBI collaborators have been working,
check the Fieldwork page. |
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