This internship project will focus on the plant family Phyllanthaceae, which is being revised for the Flora Malesiana Project. This includes a revision of the species in Kirganelia, a genus notorious for its difficult species concepts.
Backgroundand context
Flora Malesiana is an international flora project aiming to name, describe and inventory the complete vascular plant flora of Malesia. For the project the plant family Phyllanthaceae, split off from the Euphorbiaceae, is being revised. This includes a revision of the species in Kirganelia, a genus notorious for its difficult species concepts. Hybseq sequencing showed that groupings exist in the genus. The next step will be to train an image recognition program with the sequenced samples and let it classify the remaining specimens in the genus.
Objectivesand goals
During the internship you will test the species as identified by the molecular research and classify all other specimens via image recognition. The latter requires making photos of parts of the herbarium specimens collected at Naturalis Biodiversity Center and crop-editing specimen images from another herbaria.
Materialsand methods
Clean species circumscriptions will be made based on molecular data and image recognition. The next step will be to evaluate the species via morphological study. The result will be one or two published papers.
Studentrequirements
Familiarity with taxonomy and/or image recognition will be helpful.