Using the Florida Museum summer travel grant, I was able to attend the International Botanical Congress in Madrid, Spain, which is a conference that happens only once every four years, and brings researchers in botany from all over the world to present on their best and most impactful research. I was accepted to present work that will be included in both the second and third chapters of my dissertation, and got invaluable feedback about these projects that will go on to shape these chapters’ final forms. This work was titled “Tracing origins of a flora and drivers of speciation in a center of overlooked floristic complexity in a biodiversity hotspot, the North American Coastal Plain”, and worked with publicly available phylogenetic and occurrence data to understand the endemic diversity of plants in the area surrounding the Florida Panhandle. I was so pleasantly surprised by how many people from other parts of the world were interested in my research which pertains to such a small area in the Southeastern United States, as they would talk to me about my methodology or my findings themselves. I feel that significant work has already been done to stress how biologically interesting the North American Coastal Plain (NACP) as a whole is, but I am hopeful that some of my conversations have started to get researchers who are less familiar with the Southeastern United States thinking about the complexity of these smaller, high endemism areas within the NACP.
As mentioned above, the major takeaway from this conference was just the ability to talk to and meet so many researchers from all over the world that have expertise in my research interests. I was able to attend amazing talks about the state of new genetic methods that I am using in my research, talks about the specific group of plants that I work on (which is often overlooked at smaller conferences), and talks about new methodology for the computational modeling of plant ranges and their responses to ecological stressors, which I also use in my research. I learned so many of the best new methods, which came at the perfect time in the course of my PhD, as I am working to finish analyses, find new ways to analyze my data, and write up my work. I feel that my own research will be made significantly stronger by the talks I was able to attend, and the conversations I had with those working on projects similar to my own.
Additionally, I spent significant time outside of the conference connecting and networking with these other researchers that I just met at the conference, or that I had met in passing at previous smaller conferences. On one night, I found myself at the dinner table with many of the other botanists from the United States in attendance of the conference, including the editor of the Flora of North America, as well as the Flora of the Southeastern United States, and I felt the weight of not only how cool it was to talk to these people in this setting, but also that this was an experience unique to a conference of this size and caliber. On another day, I found myself at dinner with a group of researchers from the New York Botanical Garden, talking about the identification of my focal group of plants (Xyris), and the unique diversity of this group in South America, which has set my sights on another post-graduate school goal for myself: working on understanding Xyridaceae as a group more broadly by seeing and collecting it where it most rapidly diversified.
Overall, this conference was an invaluable experience which will greatly impact my research and the development of my career. Being that it was so far away, I could not have attended without the use of the Florida Museum Travel Award, and I am so grateful for the opportunity I was given to attend before I graduated from this program. This conference will put other conferences into a different perspective, and I made long lasting connections in my field while in attendance that I otherwise would not have.
Elizabeth White is a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. through the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Biology. White is advised by Dr. Douglas Soltis, Distinguished Professor of Biology, and Dr. Pamela Soltis, Curator of Molecular Systematics and Evolutionary Genetics here at the Florida Museum.
The 2024 Summer Student Travel Awards are supported by the FLMNH Department of Natural History, including funds from the Louis C. and Jane Gapenski Endowed Fellowship and the B.J. and Eve Wilder Endowment. If you would like to help support this fund for future student awards, please go to:
Louis C. and Jane Gapenski Endowed Fellowship
B.J. and Eve Wilder Endowment