Author Archives: Jürgen

Life in the sea: A mini-mesh plant

State Herbarium Hon. Associate Bob Baldock from our Phycology Unit provided these photographs of Thuretia australasica.

This small, red alga was found attached to the stems of a seagrass collected at the Head of the Great Australian Bight in 2010. At first glance the plant appears mundane, even uninteresting.

But, under the microscope, a delicate mesh of microscopic threads forming the small, hollow, cylindrical plant body is revealed, another example of the surprises awaiting us in the microscopic world. (Note that the white, glassy particles are sand grains trapped in the mesh and not part of the alga.)

Click here for a detailed description of the species from the online version of Prof. H.B.S. Womersley‘s Marine benthic flora of southern Australia. More images can be found in Bob Baldock’s Algae revealed fact-sheet “Pictured key to some common re-mesh algae of southern Australia” (1.3MB PDF). A detailed colour plate from W.H. Harvey‘s Phycologia australasica is available from the Internet Archive (under the name Thuretia teres).

Ecology in Australia and elsewhere

It’s All About the Plants
Tuesday, 8 Sep. 2015, 10:00–12:00
Goodman Building Lecture Theatre,
adjacent to the State Herbarium of South Australia
Adelaide Botanic Garden, Hackney Road

by José Facelli
Ecology & Environmental Science, The University of Adelaide

The traditional view of ecologists is that vegetation is determined by the environment. However, there is strong evidence that individual plants can actually modify the local environment and that these modifications can have profound effects on the rest of the plant community and on ecosystem function. Importantly plants introduce spatial heterogeneity into the environment, which in turn helps to maintain diversity by creating patches that favour different species.

Almost without noticing I have been addressing these issues for over 20 years. I welcome this opportunity to bring together and share research done by myself and other members of my laboratory. I will show how living (and dead!) plants can drive ecological processes, and the importance of this for management, conservation and restoration of native vegetation.

Associate Professor José (Jope) Facelli studied Agricultural Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, but soon become bored of crops and interested in natural ecosystems. This lead to research on the effects of grazing in Patagonia and in the Pampas. He eventually completed a PhD (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey) on the effects of leaf litter on successional processes. In 1992 he moved to Adelaide where he established the Terrestrial Plant Ecology Lab. Currently the research in this laboratory includes topics as diverse as the role of soil microbes in plant invasions, the effects of fire on populations of orchids and their pollinators, and the interactions between plant parasites and their hosts.

All Herbarium staff, honoraries, volunteers, students and guests welcome. Morning tea provided.

New Journal web-page

The homepage of the Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens has moved and is now hosted by Enviro Data SA, the South Australian Government’s gateway to data and information relating to the science and monitoring of South Australia’s environment and natural resources.

The new Journal pages are easier to use and have improved search functions. All volumes and issues of the Journal from Vol. 1 (1976) are online, with articles and papers available in PDF format.

The Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published by the State Herbarium of South Australia on behalf of the Board of the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium (Adelaide, South Australia). The Journal is available online at flora.sa.gov.au/jabg and through JSTOR. Papers are published electronically as soon as they are reviewed, edited and type-set. A hardcopy volume is printed at the end of the calendar year, collating all articles published during this time. Printed volumes are distributed to botanical libraries around the world and are also available for purchase.

The Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens accepts manuscripts in the following categories:

plant systematics, taxonomy and nomenclature of plants, algae and fungi
evolution and biogeography
descriptive plant morphology and anatomy
plant biology, genetics and ecology
obituaries, biography and history
bibliographic studies and book reviews
botanical illustrations.

Focus of the journal is on taxa from the Australasian region, but manuscripts from other regions of the world may be considered. Please contact the Editor, Jürgen Kellermann, for more information.

WA now has 10000 plant species

Angianthus globuliformis M.Lyons & Keighery

Our colleagues at the Western Australian Herbarium have announced the addition of the Western Australia’s 10,000th species of native vascular plants to their Census. Angianthus globuliformis is a small daisy and occurs only on gypsum-rich dunes at the margins of one salt lake near the town of Lake Grace in the Wheatbelt region. The species was first discovered in 2000, but not formally described until May 2015 in the WA Herbarium’s journal Nuytsia.

Western Australia is one of the world’s biodiversity hot-spots. More than 50 new native plant species are named and described each year from WA . That state has the greatest number of plants in Australia; if subspecies and varieties are included (i.e. “taxa” are counted), this increases to over 12,400 natives. In 2009, the number of described vascular plant species in Australia was reported as 19,324, and the total number estimated to be about 21,645.

In South Australia, the number of native vascular plant taxa (i.e. species, subspecies and varieties) is currently at 3,463. In addition there are 1,536 weeds present in the state. The number of taxa added to the SA Census is about 50 per year, which can be roughly divided into three: one third are newly described taxa, one third are plants already known in neighbouring states and now recorded as occurring here, and the last third are weed species.

NT Flora online

The Northern Territory has now released its own online Flora. The state has a distinctive flora of more than 4,300 species of native plants, including some 702 endemic species, concentrated particularly on the Western Arnhem Land Plateau. The first version of eflora.nt.gov.au features:

Checklists of NT Plants, threatened species and weeds
Searching of flora information by any combination of spatial attributes, plant name or plant characteristics including conservation status to produce a species list
Access to Northern Territory Herbarium specimen data
Browsing by plant name to access fact sheets and other information
Fact sheets include distribution maps, illustrations, photos of each plant, conservation status, distribution, flowering times and other information; also available are PDFs of descriptions and keys.

The NT eFlora will be particularly interesting for people working on the Flora of arid South Australia, as many plant species occur in both states. More information and images are promised in future updates.