Mark your calendars now for May 13 at Powder Valley from 7-9 pm. We have reserved a double-wide classroom to accommodate you. There will not be an Earthstar printed before then, so this email will be your notification.

We are honored to have as our guest speaker our new member, Dr. David Bogler, a curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden . He will give a 40 minute general talk that will be of value to any botanist on the subject of taxonomy and cladistics.

Taxonomy is the science of classifying objects and the practice of grouping plants, animals, and microorganisms into increasingly broader categories based on a variety of shared features. The resulting “system” contains predictive information about the organisms and allows for efficient naming. Traditionally, organisms were grouped in a hierarchical “box-within-a-box” arrangement by physical resemblances, but in recent times evolutionary relationships are also considered. A clade is a term for a branch, and cladistics is the study of the tree-like evolutionary branching relationships of organisms. These trees can be recovered on the basis of shared characteristics derived from a common ancestor. Genetic data from DNA analysis has become increasingly important, for both plants and fungi. Examples will be given from fungi, plants, and animals.

David worked on Volumes 2 and 3 of Steyermark’s Flora of Missouri, the Flora North America project, and is currently producing interactive online keys of grasses and legumes for the USDA. He taught courses in biology, botany, ecology and evolution at the University of Texas . He has worked at Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami on Cycads using DNA techniques. He is also an accomplished photographer. You can catch a glimpse at http://davidbogler.com.

Also, bring in your fungal finds for identification. That’s a big element of these new bimonthly meetings.