New botanist aims to revitalize herbarium collections for Texas A&M AgriLife
Dawson White to incorporate advanced plant systematics, herbarium science and biodiversity research
Dawson White, Ph.D., is bringing his global studies of plant diversity, which combines field observation and collections, herbarium specimens, genomics and emerging spectral technologies, to the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
As a new assistant professor of plant systematics and curator of the S.M. Tracy Herbarium in the Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology, White will build a collections-based research program focused on plant diversity, evolution and botanical collections.
White, who grew up in Telluride, Colorado, will also lead the Integrative Plant Systematics Lab, which begins taking on students and researchers this fall.
As a Texas A&M AgriLife Research ecologist and botanist, White will focus his research on how many plant species exist, where they occur, how they vary, and how evolutionary processes have shaped their forms, functions and habitats.
A collections-based approach
White’s scientific home base is the S.M. Tracy Herbarium, which houses about 360,000 dried and pressed plant specimens, some over 100 years old. Each specimen is a physical record of a plant collected at a particular place and time, often with information about its habitat, collector and identity. Together, these specimens form a research archive of plant diversity across landscapes and generations.
White said the S.M. Tracy Herbarium was especially compelling because of its internationally significant collection of North American grasses, a group central to rangelands, agriculture, conservation and ecosystem function.
He joined Texas A&M from the Harvard University Herbaria, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. The resources, support for interdisciplinary science, and the scale of the scientific community Texas A&M AgriLife serves also drew him to the position.
“Texas A&M is an ideal place to build a collections-based plant science program,” White said. “The S.M. Tracy Herbarium, the strength in agricultural and ecological research across scientific disciplines, and the scale of Texas A&M AgriLife’s mission all connect directly with the kind of botany I want to do.”
In addition to his research, White will teach courses on plant diversity and evolution, grasses, and on collection-based research and the curation of biological collections.
Bringing back botany
White outlined two goals for his role in the department. He wants to “bring back botany” as a prominent academic discipline and he wants to expand the role of herbarium collections across disciplines by turning preserved specimens into sources of genomic, chemical, functional and ecological data.
He wants to combine classical expertise in plant identification and collections with modern tools such as genomics, spectroscopy and artificial intelligence.
“There are still many gaps in the map in Texas and globally, and many groups of plants that require scientific revision,” White said. “Especially in rangeland ecosystems, a better understanding of plant variation can be applied to improved management and stewardship options for landowners in support of productive ecosystems.“
One avenue to expand the role of the herbarium is iHerbSpec, an international working group he helps lead to develop standards for measuring reflectance spectra from herbarium specimens. The goal is to use preserved leaves to estimate plant traits, improve taxonomic identification and make collections more useful for ecology, evolution and biotechnology.
He also leads ¡Viva Centinela!, a botany-based conservation project in western Ecuador where field teams are documenting threatened plants, describing new species, and supporting conservation actions in some of the region’s last remaining forest fragments.
“My goal is to advance botanical science here at Texas A&M and make plant collections more visible, more useful and more connected to the questions people are asking about land, crops and biodiversity,” White said.
