Duke Bryology Laboratory
Paludella squarrosa females  

 

Horseshoe Lake, Sept. 2005Welcome to the Duke Bryology Lab site

Members of the bryology lab at Duke are involved in a broad range of taxonomic, phylogenetic, molecular, ecological, and floristic research. Our general goal is to apply appropriate laboratory and field techniques to understand patterns and processes of evolution in mosses, liverworts, and hornworts. We interact extensively with other lab groups in the biology department dealing with complementary problems in organismal evolution.

The bryology lab group holds informal weekly meetings at which we discuss current papers, critique each other's work in progress, "brainstorm" potential research plans, and share good food. Other related activities in which we participate are the weekly systematics seminar series, the more informal weekly systematics discussion group, and the population biology discussion group.


Enter the 4th International Meeting on the Biology of Sphagnum, Alaska, 1-11 August 2008, website


LiToL logoEnter the LiToL project website


Summer 2005 and 2006 - undergraduate student project

The Department of Biology at Duke University hosted seven undergraduate students each summer (2004-2006) in an NSF-funded research program in Bioinformatic and Phylogenetic Approaches to the Study of Plant and Fungal Biodiversity.
Francis Beecher (Gannon U.) studied fungal endophytes of mosses with Kim and Ping in the Bryology Lab in 2005.
During the summer of 2006, Sarah Assefa (Clark U.) is analysing collection data to clarify biodiversity patterns in bryophytes of North Carolina. Results of the databasing effort and her analysis will be presented in Botany 2006 meeting in Chico, CA. Download pdf of the poster here [753KB].

The National Science Foundation has funded a grant for data basing Duke bryophyte collections from the southeastern U.S. We had support to hire two undergraduate students in summer 2005 for work on the project. The students focused on entering data for rare species into our data base, and also conducted field studies of selected taxa, photographically documented their ecology, morphology, and patterns of variation, and prepared information for inclusion in the project website.


Last update: November 7, 2007


 Shaw Laboratory
 139 Biological Sciences Bldg.
 Box 90338
 Department of Biology
 Duke University
 Durham
 North Carolina 27708
 U.S.A.

 Phone: (+1) 919 660-7345
 Fax: (+1) 919 660-7293