Luis Zacarias
Research Mentor(s): Theodore Matel
Mentor Department: Earth and Environmental Science
Authors: Luis Zacarias, Theodore Matel
Session: Session 6 (3:00pm – 3:50pm)
Presentation Type: Poster 73
Abstract
This project is characterizing the leaf architecture–the two-dimensional morphology of a leaf represented by its size, shape, and venation network–of species of the family Annonaceae that occur in a 25-hectare mapped forest plot in Amazonas, Colombia. The Annonaceae (custard apple family) comprise ca. 2400 species that are globally distributed in tropical regions of the world and form a major component of the biomass and species diversity of western Amazonian forests. Using pictures collected and scanned of 40 species of 12 genera of the Annonaceae family, leaves including the genera Duguetia, Guatteria, and Oxandra were scored for 27 venation characteristics from The Manual of Leaf Architecture. Previous systematic studies in the Annonaceae have emphasized fruit and floral morphology in differentiating genera and species, but leaves represent an abundant and easily accessible organ with complex and understudied variation. The leaf characteristics observed in this study range from the shape of the leaf to the angle of both the distal and proximal end of the leaf and the characteristics of different levels of vein orders between genera and species. There are major similarities between genera, with some showing constant variations on certain characteristics. The compiled data (including the other families that are in the Colombian rainforest) will be used as training data for a convolutional neural network that scores leaf architectural characteristics and is applied to further catalog the plant composition of the rainforests in Colombia.
