Edaphic adaptation maintains the coexistence of two cryptic species on serpentine soils

• Premise of the study: Divergent edaphic adaptation can contribute to reproductive isolation and coexistence between closely related species, yet we know little about how small-scale continuous edaphic gradients contribute to this phenomenon. We investigated edaphic adaptation between two cryptic species of California wildflower, Lasthenia californica and L. gracilis (Asteraceae), which grow in close parapatry on serpentine soil. • Methods: We reciprocally transplanted both species into the center of each species’ habitat and the transition zone between species. We quantified multiple components of fitness and used aster models to predict fitness based on environmental variables. We sampled soil across the ridge throughout the growing season to document edaphic changes through time. We sampled naturally germinating seedlings to determine whether there was dispersal into the adjacent habitat and to help pinpoint the timing of any selection against migrants. • Key results: We documented within-serpentine adaptation contributing to habitat isolation between close relatives. Both species were adapted to the edaphic conditions in their native region and suffered fitness trade-offs when moved outside that region. However, observed fitness values did not perfectly match those predicted by edaphic variables alone, indicating that other factors, such as competition, also contributed to plant fitness. Soil water content and concentrations of calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium were likely drivers of differential fitness. Plants either had limited dispersal ability or migrants experienced early-season mortality outside their native region. • Conclusions: Demonstrating that continuous habitats can support differently adapted, yet closely related, taxa is important to a broader understanding of how species are generated and maintained in nature

Old Plants, New Tricks:Phenological Research Using Herbarium Specimens

The timing of phenological events, such as leaf-out and flowering, strongly influence plant success and their study is vital to understanding how plants will respond to climate change. Phenological research, however, is often limited by the temporal, geographic, or phylogenetic scope of available data. Hundreds of millions of plant specimens in herbaria worldwide offer a potential solution to this problem, especially as digitization efforts drastically improve access to collections. Herbarium specimens represent snapshots of phenological events and have been reliably used to characterize phenological responses to climate. We review the current state of herbarium-based phenological research, identify potential biases and limitations in the collection, digitization, and interpretation of specimen data, and discuss future opportunities for phenological investigations using herbarium specimens

Edaphic adaptation maintains the coexistence of two cryptic species on serpentine soil

• Premise of the study: Divergent edaphic adaptation can contribute to reproductive isolation and coexistence between closely related species, yet we know little about how small-scale continuous edaphic gradients contribute to this phenomenon. We investigated edaphic adaptation between two cryptic species of California wildflower, Lasthenia californica and L. gracilis (Asteraceae), which grow in close parapatry on serpentine soil. • Methods: We reciprocally transplanted both species into the center of each species’ habitat and the transition zone between species. We quantified multiple components of fitness and used aster models to predict fitness based on environmental variables. We sampled soil across the ridge throughout the growing season to document edaphic changes through time. We sampled naturally germinating seedlings to determine whether there was dispersal into the adjacent habitat and to help pinpoint the timing of any selection against migrants. • Key results: We documented within-serpentine adaptation contributing to habitat isolation between close relatives. Both species were adapted to the edaphic conditions in their native region and suffered fitness trade-offs when moved outside that region. However, observed fitness values did not perfectly match those predicted by edaphic variables alone, indicating that other factors, such as competition, also contributed to plant fitness. Soil water content and concentrations of calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium were likely drivers of differential fitness. Plants either had limited dispersal ability or migrants experienced early-season mortality outside their native region. • Conclusions: Demonstrating that continuous habitats can support differently adapted, yet closely related, taxa is important to a broader understanding of how species are generated and maintained in nature

The evolution of postpollination reproductive isolation in Costus

Reproductive isolation is critical to the diversification of species. Postpollination barriers may be important in limiting gene flow between closely related species, but they are relatively cryptic and their evolution is poorly understood. Here, we review the role of postpollination reproductive isolation in plants, including the various stages at which it operates and the hypotheses for how it may evolve. We then review empirical studies in the plant genus Costus, evaluating documented postpollination barriers in light of these hypotheses. We summarize isolation due to parental style length differences and present evidence supporting the hypothesis that the differences are in part a by-product of selection on floral morphology. Additionally, we show that reduced pollen adhesion, germination, and tube growth contribute to reproductive isolation between two closely related sympatric species of Costus. Geographic variation in the strength of these crossing barriers supports the hypothesis that they evolved under reinforcement, or direct natural selection to strengthen isolation

Taxonomic Curation in a Multi-taxa Symbiota Portal

Symbiota is an open-source software that allows the creation of online portals for accessing, managing, and mobilizing biodiversity data (Gries et al. 2014, Symbiota Support Hub 2021). Most of the portals are focused on communities with specific taxonomic interests, which often allows the construction of specialized taxonomic thesauri by portal managers (Gilbert et al. 2020, Pearson 2021a). A portal dedicated to the full range of collections in one country (Portal de Biodiversidad de Guatemala 2022) has represented an interesting challenge for taxonomic management. The Guatemala Biodiversity portal currently allows the digitization and active management of 29 natural history collections in this country, including collections of vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, fungi, lichens, and fossils. Additionally, two institutional observation collections are live managed within the portal (Orellana et al. 2022). This brings up the need to have a suitable taxonomic thesaurus that serves all the collection managers involved. Similar to other Symbiota portals, the Guatemala Biodiversity portal facilitates the incorporation of external catalogs such as Catalog of Life (Bánki et al. 2022), and the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS Editorial Board 2022), resources which could easily constitute the base of the taxonomic thesaurus of the portal. However, due to the regional focus of this site, it is not ideal to add all the species available in these virtual catalogs. A partial solution has been importing snapshot collections with Guatemalan records from different Symbiota portals, or from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF.org 2022). This approach takes advantage of the specimens identified by specialists in different collections around the world, and the taxonomic cleaning tools available in Symbiota portals (Pearson 2021b) allow the curation of the scientific names.Nevertheless, these automated tools are often not enough to maintain the taxonomic thesaurus in understudied regions, such as Guatemala, and the manual curation of species names is still necessary. The curation of the taxonomic thesaurus in this portal is a work in progress, and we are achieving this with the creation of curated checklists within the portal (Orellana 2022, Pearson and Walker 2021), with the incorporation of names in published catalogs (Cano 2006, Cano and Schuster 2012, Camacho et al. 2022), and with the curation of the available names according to institutional catalogs (CECON 2022). Additional information about the conservation status of the species is being added to the taxon profile pages, attaching recent data provided by the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and publications by local researchers (IUCN 2021, Elías et al. 2022). The availability of a regional curated taxonomic thesaurus in the Guatemala Biodiversity portal is still limited and restricted to groups like vertebrates and certain groups of insects, yet this online resource is useful for researchers who are working in local collections or are compiling information to publish new catalogs and checklists for Guatemala. Continuing with the improvement of this taxonomic resource is necessary not only to advance the knowledge of the biodiversity of Guatemala but to aggregate this information into relevant global catalogs

Leveraging the Symbiota Support Hub for Biodiversity Data Mobilization

Symbiota is an open source software for managing and mobilizing biodiversity data from physical and virtual collections. Over 700 natural history collections use Symbiota as their primary content management system, and over 600 additional collections use Symbiota portals to mobilize a copy or subsamples of their data for use by specific communities of expertise. For both "live-managed" and "snapshot" collections, Symbiota provides data import, export, and publishing tools to lower data mobilization barriers. For example, collections in Symbiota portals can publish their data directly to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio) using Darwin Core Archive protocols for data sharing, obviating the need to install or host local Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) instances. Over 150 institutions currently use this workflow to publish datasets to GBIF. The strengths of Symbiota's approach to mobilization are part technical and part social. Once a collection has data in a portal, using the portal’s built-in data mobilization tools requires little technical expertise, and Symbiota portal managers are typically very accessible and helpful in assisting with the process. With sustained funding of the iDigBio Symbiota Support Hub, we are increasing the capacity of Symbiota to mobilize biodiversity through (1) improved documentation regarding the data mobilization process (https://symbiota.org/docs); (2) increased capacity for individualized attention to users through a larger service team and a robust help desk system; (3) the launch of "Portal Advancement Campaigns"—targeted efforts to promote data quality and mobilization (e.g., publishing to data aggregators); and (4) the development of an API infrastructure to enhance data interoperability and accessibility. We provide an overview of these new technologies and services for promoting and assisting with data mobilization, and we discuss future developments

Symbiota Integrations: Exploration of Historical and Current Methods of Data Sharing Across a Decentralized Portal Network and Goals of Extending Interoperability Globally

Over the last decade, the Symbiota open-source software has been readily available to establish occurrence-based data portals that represent the taxonomic and geographic expertise of a specific community of researchers. Reasons for establishing a data portal vary, but often focus on:data mobilization via the creation of public data access points (e.g., in-house search and export tools, Application Programming Interface (API) access, publication tools pushing data up to aggregators);tools and workflows that support active specimen digitization projectsa method for staging and preparing datasets for analysis to answer specific research questions (e.g., data assessment, correction, augmentation).The software functions as a Content Management System (CMS) allowing any dataset to be collaboratively augmented, modified, and managed online. Currently, the software provides support for over 1000 collection datasets to manage their specimen data directly within a Symbiota portal as a live managed dataset. Portals often include “snapshot” data imported from externally managed systems, which are updated on a regular schedule. Depending on the goals of a project, portals will vary in the composition of live to snapshot collections, though most contain a mixture of both. In this respect, data portals serve as intermediate aggregators, integrating multiple specimen datasets that collectively represent a community-based research perspective.Symbiota portals typically function as mid-level data aggregators that are community driven by a group of researchers with expertise within a specific taxonomic domain. This decentralized approach has been shown to promote the emergence of multiple regionally, taxonomically, or institutionally localized, self-identifying communities of practice. Each community is empowered to control the social and informational design and versioning of their local data infrastructures and signals. The upfront cost of decentralization is more than offset by the long-term benefit of achieving sustained expert engagement, higher-quality data products, and ultimately more societal impact for biodiversity data.In contrast to the vision of pushing data from the source to the global aggregators and ultimately out to the research community, Symbiota records are distributed across a growing array of sub-aggregators. For instance, Arizona State University Vascular Plant Herbarium's specimen data consist of a live managed dataset within SEINet with subsets of their data pushed out to the Portal de Biodiversidad de Guatemala and the Cooperative Taxonomic Resource for American Myrtaceae Symbiota portals as snapshot record sets. Not only does this support research associated with each of the portal communities, it exposes the records to researchers with local and taxonomic expertise to review, correct, and comment on the occurrence data. While the Symbiota portals provide tools for these communities to annotate the distributed snapshot records, the annotations need to be directed back to the source collection. Aside from the technical challenges, there are social negotiations that need to be considered. Collection managers might not want to integrate external edits, or the collection might be understaffed without anyone to approve the information transfer. Issues associated with “round-tripping” back to the source are complicated. Nevertheless, global coordination is feasible through automatable data sharing agreements that enable efficient propagation and translation of biodiversity data across communities.Within this presentation, we will explore ways specimen and annotation data have been shared across the Symbiota portal network, as well as the associated technical and social challenges we have encountered. We will also present recent enhancements in tracking project metadata, data provenance, record annotations, and the establishment of a public API architecture. These developments are leveraged to regulate machine-to-machine annotation propagation to enhance interoperability by providing support for real-time transmission of occurrence annotations across the distributed network of Symbiota portals. By demonstrating methods and challenges associated with data sharing across the Symbiota portal network, we strive to contribute to the global discussion of data sharing, but more importantly, solicit input and direction from the greater community on how we can improve data sharing beyond the Symbiota network

Old Plants, New Tricks: Phenological Research Using Herbarium Specimens.

The timing of phenological events, such as leaf-out and flowering, strongly influence plant success and their study is vital to understanding how plants will respond to climate change. Phenological research, however, is often limited by the temporal, geographic, or phylogenetic scope of available data. Hundreds of millions of plant specimens in herbaria worldwide offer a potential solution to this problem, especially as digitization efforts drastically improve access to collections. Herbarium specimens represent snapshots of phenological events and have been reliably used to characterize phenological responses to climate. We review the current state of herbarium-based phenological research, identify potential biases and limitations in the collection, digitization, and interpretation of specimen data, and discuss future opportunities for phenological investigations using herbarium specimens