Friday Fabulous Flowers - SYCs

As any good field botanist knows SYCs are the birder's equivalent of LBJs (little brown jobs).  SYC stands for Stinking Yellow Composites, composites being the old irregular name for the Aster family, plants with daisy-like, dandelion-like inflorescences, which many people wrongly take as single flowers.  In the late summer and fall lots of them come into flower, especially on the prairie, and they are largely yellow.  Not the easiest group of plants to sort out accurately even for us professionals.  Here are three that TPP collected yesterday on a local prairie and with no more than 3 hours of effort using field guides, online resource, and the Flora of North America, three reasonable like 85% positive identifications were made.  All three SYCs are in the genus Helianthus, sunflowers as the name says. The trick is, which species?  At this point they would be H. grosseserratus, the sawtoothed sunflower, H. pauciflorus, the stiff sunflower, and H. tuberosus, the Jerusalem artichoke or sunchoke, which is native, no matter what the name suggest (top to bottom). The goldenrods collected at the same time were even harder.
In the bottom image you can see the ray flowers around the outside looking like petals. In the center, making the button or disk, are star-shaped flowers, all these small flowers arranged to present the image to pollinators of a big flower. 

Botany 2015 by the numbers and some plant identification

TPP has been struggling with a few plant identifications these past couple of hours; a sunflower (just checking the id - Helianthus laetiflorus var. rigidus), a rosinweed, a couple of species (maybe?) of Solidago, and an unknown Aster with tiny little rayless heads. Does everyone know what SYC stands for? At any rate if you have ever waded through identification keys for any of these, especially the aster and goldenrod, you'll understand why TPP is allowing some email distraction followed by a bit of blogging.
The final report on the North American botany meetings that TPP just attended in Edmonton, Alberta, provided some encouraging numbers and demonstrated that this was one of the most diverse and best attended botany meetings in any ones' memory. Over 1600 students and faculty, and at least one dean, were in attendance, and while largely from the USA and Canada, over 50 countries were in represented. Over 900 talks and lectures were presented and there were acres of posters (almost 500 posters) and not enough time to see any thing close to all of them. This meeting was a collaboration among 14 scientific societies. It was just great. If you want to get a flavor of all this botanical science here's a link to some youtube videos of people presenting their posters. There are a couple of TPP's favorite colleagues in there, but they won't be identified so as to not sully their reputations.
Back to plant IDs. Ah, TPP guessed rightly about the aster being an Aster; it was tricky because it's a species that lacks ray flowers. Surprisingly, only one herbarium specimen exists of Aster brachyactis for positive comparison probably because of this plants drab, ho-hum floral display and weedy demeanor. However, that was an old field guide (but familiar) and the Flora of North America indicates that this species has been moved to another genus and reduced to synonymy with Symphyotrichum ciliatum. Here's a link to this beauty.