| 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. |
| Inventoring Euphorbia: recent collecting trips. |
| Apr 2009 |
| Plant collecting work by our collaborators has been done recently in Madagascar, Seychelles and Mauritius, Mexico, Cape Verde, and South America (Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina). Check the Fieldwork page for further details (pictures are not yet available, sorry!). |
| 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 |
| Ivalú 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 Ivalú 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. |
|
