Plant Science: Areas of interest

Conservation Science

Regional Floristics

VIOLA CONSPERSA (DOG VIOLET)

Viola conspersa (dog violet)

Conservation Botanist Dr. Pati Vitt is a census taker for violets — specifically, a native violet called Viola conspersa that is threatened in Illinois. In an effort to pin down how this plant can survive, she tracks the births, deaths, sizes and other demographics over the years. In the field, she and her interns crawl on the ground, counting flowers and measuring plants within defined areas; as a sleuth in the lab, she uses advanced technology to analyze genes.

"Every plant has a story," she commented. And she won't be satisfied until she finds out the full story of V. conspersa and why populations of this northeastern Illinois forest native is disappearing in the state. One intriguing clue may be the plant's two types of flowers.

Not only does the plant have the lilac-colored spring blossoms usually associated with violets, but it also has ever-present inconspicuous green flowers that self-fertilize. Dr. Vitt speculated, "There's a possibility that the majority of reproductive success is through self-fertilization." However, this may lead to a lack of genetic diversity that may contribute to its decline.

The dual method of reproduction is one reason Dr. Vitt selected V. conspersa for study. She is also attracted by its beauty, its state-listed status and the lack of research on the plant. But the main reason for her choice is the plant's natural occurrence in the Garden's own McDonald Woods, where well-documented restoration of the entire community is taking place, including the removal of invasive species such as buckthorn.

"This study is one of the first looking at population-level response to management that occurs on an ecosystem level," noted Dr. Vitt. "It is significant because intensive management will become more and more important to conservation, and most management is at the habitat level." The V. conspersa study may have implications for how conservationists act on concerns about both individual species and a habitat as a whole.

In addition to expanding field work to three new sites in the past few years, Dr. Vitt and her interns have added new lab work related to a trait called "plasticity." They are seeing if individual plants have the capacity to respond to changes in the environment that might make up for their lack of genetic diversity.