Speaker: Jon P. Rebman, Ph.D., Curator/Chair of Botany at the San Diego Natural History Museum
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DESCRIPTION
As a result of data compiled in the annotated, voucher-based checklist of the vascular plants of Baja California, Mexico published by Rebman and co-authors in 2016, the flora of the Baja California peninsula and adjacent islands includes approximately 4400 different plants, of which 26% are endemic to the region. Consequently, this floristic publication also identified several plants in the region that are very rare, often threatened, and only known from one to very few collections. Rebman and colleagues received a National Geographic Society grant to revisit the type localities of 15 endemic and “lost” species in order to try and re-discover them for science and determine if the populations are at risk. During two years of fieldwork, the team re-discovered 10 of 13 lost plants.
The SD Herbarium houses approximately 280,000 plant specimens primarily collected from the Southern California and Baja California region. This collection provides a source of raw data on our native plants that can be used to study and re-evaluate them in many different ways. For example, studies on specimens collected of Acmispon haydonii ( Haydon’s Lotus) andVerbena lasiostachys (Western Vervain) have shown that our understanding of these species is not what we had expected nor what is currently reflected in our scientific literature.
Jon P. Rebman, Ph.D. has been the Mary and Dallas Clark Endowed Chair/Curator of Botany at the San Diego Natural History Museum (SDNHM) since 1996. Dr. Rebman is a plant taxonomist and conducts extensive floristic research on the Baja California peninsula and in San Diego and Imperial Counties of California. He leads various field classes and botanical expeditions each year and is actively naming new plant species from the region. His primary research interests have centered on the systematics of the Cactus family in Baja California, especially the genera Cylindropuntia (chollas) and Opuntia (prickly-pears). However, Dr. Rebman also does a lot of general floristic research and he has co-published the new Annotated Checklist of the Vascular Plants of Baja California, Mexico and the most recent edition of the Checklist of the Vascular Plants of San Diego County.
He has over 25 years of field experience with surveying and documenting plants including rare and endangered species. As a field botanist, he is a very active collector of scientific specimens with his personal collections numbering over 35,000. He is the director of the San Diego County Plant Atlas project (www.sdplantatlas.org) and identifies/verifies all of the new specimens (currently over 69,000) coming into the herbarium through this scientific endeavor. As the curator of the SD Herbarium at the SDNHM, he is in charge of this dried plant specimen collection that contains over 270,000 specimens dating back to the 1870s. Rebman published the newest edition of the Baja California Plant Field Guide with co-author Norman Roberts in 2012, and is working on a new bilingual, plant field guide for the Cape region of Baja California Sur.
EMAIL Jon P. Rebman, Ph.D.