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| Stephen Dreher |
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Place of Birth: St. Louis, Missouri Age: 53 Favorite Wine: Chateauneuf du Pape Favorite Plant: Sphaeralcea caespitosa Favorite Song: Iggy Pop “The Passenger” My interest in botanical science developed later in life after pursuing other, quite unrelated, passions. In the mid-late 1970’s I managed a non-commercial radio station in Columbia, Missouri and co-founded the National Association of Community Broadcasters. Afterwards, I returned to academia and earned a BFA in motion picture production at New York University in 1982. The next decade I worked in film and broadcast television. Upon moving to Southern California in 1991, I became dissatisfied with that path. One thing led to another and I got a job as nursery manager of the Theodore Payne Native Plant Foundation in the San Fernando Valley. This was a fantastic opportunity to learn the area’s flora, history, ecology and, of course, how plants grow. Eventually, I decided to make this my life’s work and was accepted into the ecology program at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. During my year there, I took Dr. David Keil’s plant systematics class, which converted me from ecology to botany. RSA offered me the opportunity to join the research program as a grad student and it’s been a rewarding experience. I am working with Sphaeralcea or globemallow, not surprisingly a genus in the family Malvaceae. The group has an amphi-tropical disjunct distribution between temperate semi-arid regions (for the most part) in southern South America, primarily Argentina and western North America. Sphaeralcea is a taxonomically challenging group and consists of about 40-45 species and subspecies, depending on whose circumscriptions one accepts. The most recent monographs are from 1935 for North America (Kearney and 1949 for South America (Krapovickas). “Lumping” and “splitting” have occurred since among various floristicians. Research efforts include a molecular phylogeny and a significant interspecific crossing study. The crossing work involves 27 taxa, all crossed with one another, with the goals of confirming suspected large-scale natural hybridization, determining patterns of reproductive barriers and mapping the results onto the molecular phylogenies. On the molecular side, an ITS phylogeny is mostly completed and am working to add the AdhC locus. Plastid markers so far have offered very little variation and I haven’t finalized which one (or two) will be used. The results already indicate some intriguing possibilities for addressing species concepts. |