On my first day in Miami I met Dr Alan Meerow from the USDA. My host, Dr Patrick Griffith, who is the director of the Montgomery Botanical Garden, arranged for us to meet.

Alan and I had a lot to talk about! Alan works on ornamental plants, but his true passion is population genetics. We talked about his work on Amaryllis, Iris, and of course cycads.

Alan has been working on a complex of cycads in the Caribbean. I had closely read one of Alan's recent papers on the population genetics of three species from Puerto Rico, so it was really helpful to talk to him about his insights on this type of work since I'm going to be conducting similar research on the Australian cycads.

Alan (top left) also gave me a tour of the facilities at the USDA. I was impressed with the robot for automating some of their experiments - even though Alan told me it's a bit outdated (top right)! I also took a couple of photos of the outside of the building (bottom two pictures).

On my last day at the University of Florida I had a meeting with Dr Charlotte Germain-Aubrey. I met Charlotte after she gave a fascinating talk at the botany conference about extinction of species in Florida due to climate changes (the link is in a previous post). We talked about doing some similar analyses for the cycads, and I'm excited to see what we will find.

Charlotte works at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and I took a picture of her with some bird collections from the late 1800s.

While in Gainesville, I also spent some time with Dr Emily Sessa. Emily is a newcomer to the University of Florida, and here she is in her lab that is being renovated.

Emily works on ferns, specifically the genus Dryopteris. She combines multiple disciplines, molecular systematics, ecology and physiology to understand the outcomes of hybridization.

She also has a fun blog on ferns: No seeds, no fruits, no flowers: no problem.

It was the weekend and we did some sightseeing around Gainesville. As plant enthusiasts, Dr Gordon Burleigh, from the University of Florida, and I went to the local Kanapaha Botanical Gardens. Of course I had to see all the cycads. There was the native cycad Zamia floridana, which was surrounding one of the many gazebos. Some of the cycads were coning (which is how cycads reproduce). On the bottom right is a male plant with a pollen cone (from the genus Dioon), and on the left is a female plant with a seed cone (from the genus Zamia).

We also visited a sinkhole. Sinkholes are home to a unique flora and they are just stunning! There are many around, and the one we visited in Gainesville is called Devil's Millhopper. It was teeming with ferns (Thelypteris), and pines and oaks. And there's a raised series of stairs that led to the water at the bottom of the sinkhole. It's hard to capture the enormity of it but I've put a few pictures of it below.

After the conference I headed to Gainesville, which is north of Miami (check out the map). It's home to the University of Florida, which has the gator as their mascot and it's the home of gatorade.

I met with Dr Gordon Burleigh who works on the computational side of plant evolution. We chatted about studying ferns and cycads using a method he has developed called "natural language processing". This is a method for reading and transforming texts into data that we can use for analyses.

After that he took me for a tour of Lake Alice on campus. Above are some pictures of Lake Alice, which even has an alligator warning sign (top two images). There we saw an alligator and turtle (middle). Nearby we saw the native cycad Zamia floridana being used as a landscaping plant, and that's Gordon admiring the plants from a bridge (bottom).

After three days of intense talks and scientific discussions I was exhausted! But it was extraordinarily inspiring to see so much exciting and cutting edge research. And it was a real joy to see many so friends and colleagues from across the US and the world.

Here are some links to some of the talks I enjoyed:

• understanding the ecology of a typically overlooked reproductive stage of ferns, the gametophyte
• how to use plant collections such as herbaria to predict future changes to our floras, in this case Florida
  
• using neuroscience to “teach” software how to identify plants from the patterns of leaf veins.
  

The Botanical Society of America with many other botanical societies have a yearly conference, and this year’s meeting was in beautiful New Orleans, bringing together about 1100 botanists.

The meeting started with a lecture by Dr. Nalini Nadkarni. This was the most inspiring lecture I’ve ever seen! Nalini studies the canopies of tropical forests. She explained some of her many projects, and reminded us that we as scientists need to share our science with all of humanity. 

One of her projects saves mosses from being stripped from trees in the wild for the floristry industry. To do this she partnered with prisons in the state of Washington. Prisoners learned to identify moss species and chose the easy to propagate species, which they then grew in the prisons. They are now cultivating tonnes of mosses across multiple prisons, and in doing so they are saving moss biodiversity. Have a look at this CNN video about her work, where they call her a "science evangelist".

When we see leaves falling from the trees, this tells us that it’s autumn. When the flowers begin blooming, it’s spring. Studying these plant responses to climatic cues is called phenology.

Prior to the conference, I attended a half-day workshop on phenology given by members of the California Phenology Project (CPP).

The CPP is a huge study tracking plants over the entire state of California. One of the project leaders, Prof Susan Mazer and her student Brian Haggerty, explained the logistics of organising and keeping track of this massive project in the workshop.

So far the CPP has 650 observers tracking 30 species for a total of 950 plants. In 2011-2012, 250,000 observations were made! That's a lot of people power! Some preliminary results are already in, and there are obvious differences in flowering time across elevations.

Using the collections of cycads in the RBG Sydney, I plan to start a cycad phenology project. Together with volunteers, we will track the reproduction/coning times of our cycads. As we collect records over many years we’ll be able to detect if climate change results in a shift in reproduction time.

Above are a few pics of New Orleans — I love the intricate lattice work and the hanging plants.