Dissertation Research: Systematic and Morphometric Studies of Holodiscus

在教师顾问Thomas Duncan博士的指导下，学生Richard Lis将在墨西哥和中美洲进行实地工作，以获取玫瑰科Holodisus属15-20种的样本。这些植物的叶片将为这些物种之间的关系的分类分析提供大多数特征。数据将使用图像分析进行积累，这是一种新的计算机数据采集方法。叶片性状将补充来自花卉和水果的额外性状，这些性状以前没有进行过彻底的调查。花蕾和枝尖将被保存下来进行染色体分析。这将是第一次利用各种证据对这一山地属进行研究，以提供一致的分类群界限，构建该物种的可靠识别检索表，并绘制植物的地理分布图。

Under the supervision of faculty adviser Dr. Thomas Duncan, student Richard Lis will conduct field work in Mexico and Central America to acquire samples of the 15-20 species of the rosaceous genus Holodiscus. Leaves of these plants will supply a majority of characters for a taxonomic analysis of relationships among these species. The data will be accumulated using image analysis, a new computer method of data acquisition. Leaf characters will be supplemented with additional characters from flowers and fruits, which have not been thoroughly surveyed previously. Flower buds and shoot apices will be preserved for chromosome analyses. This will be the first study of this montane genus to utilize a variety of lines of evidence to provide consistent circumscriptions of the taxa, to construct reliable identification keys to the species, and to map the geographic distributions of the plants.