Exploring Brazilian karst in Tocantins

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Karst in Aurora do Tocantins, central Brazil comprising highly dissected outcrops with open vegetation, and collapsed forested margins. Credits, Alex Monro.

I have been interested in karst since a child. My Grandparents lived at the foot of a large outcrop in France where I spent much of my holidays exploring for insects, rocks and plants. Through my work on nettles, a group of plants very diverse on karst, I have come to think of karst as a forgotten domain for plants. One that has received little focus from botanists. Karst is weathered limestone, a rock produced from the shells of organisms that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. It is soluble in water and the action of rain in warm climates results can in a dramatic landscape of razor-sharp rocks, deep chasms and caves. Its porous nature, slow accumulation of soil and chemical composition makes it a challenging habitat for plants that can require significant adaptations that frequently results in a very specialised flora. Because of its porous nature karst is also a major source of underground water, on which ca 25% of the world’s population depend.

Forested on collapsed karst in Tocantins with several outcrops visible in the distance. Credits, Alex Monro

Having explored karst in China for several years, where it is associated with a high diversity of rare species, I was very curious to discover how this compared with South America, whose karst has been little studied. To do so, we sourced plant collections data for Brazil, the country in South America whose karst has been best mapped and collected, and the we compared the number of species and their rarity to Brazil as a whole. The result was a publication [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53104-6] which shows that, whilst an important source of plant diversity and rare species, in Brazil it is less so than the surrounding vegetation in which it is located. This suggests that there are some fundamental differences between the karst floras of South America and Southeast Asia and prompts several hypotheses to be tested. Before doing so, however, I thought that it would make sense to spend some time collecting in one of the least known but most dramatic karst landscapes in Brazil, in Tocantins state. These are formed from 600 million year old deposits exposed ca 120 million years ago, early in the evolution of flowering plants.

Some of the plants collected in Tocantins. L-R, T-B: An unidentified and possibly new species of Apodanthera in the cucumber family; an unusual Aristolochia species in the birthwort family; a possible new species of Acanthostachys bromeliad. Credits, Alex Monro

Together with Pablo Hendrigo, Gabriel Marcuso and Julio Lombardi of the State University of Sao Paulo we spent ten days in the field. The fieldwork was great fun, with lots of climbing and regular botanical surprises. It was, however, very hot on the exposed outcrops and the rock itself weathered into very thin serrated leaves, blocks balanced on each other, with narrow chasms between them which made clambering across a nerve-wracking and exhilarating experience. We observed that the core of an outcrop often comprised an open cactus and bromeliad dominated desert-like vegetation, whilst the collapsed edges were forested. These deciduous forests were botanically the more interesting in that they were more diverse, and each had understory species unique to it. For example, the Acanthostachys and Aristolochia species above. The open vegetation of the outcrops shared most species with each other, most of which showed adaptations to the very dry and exposed conditions. Small piles of animal droppings indicated the presence of a large rodent, that we regularly glimpsed clambering over rocks. After a rainfall many fast-moving black and yellow millipedes and snails appeared. The snails seemingly grazing the lichen covered rock. In the time that we spent there we managed to explore a small handful of outcrops and I was left feeling that we had only scratched the surface.

L-R, Gabriel Marcuso, Pablo Hendrigo and Prof. Julio Lombardi. Credits, Alex Monro

Life in the field (tips for fieldwork in remote areas)

Preparing to leave for a new campsite with all of our gear and supplies

Exploring remote and little known parts of the world makes being a botanist a very exciting and rewarding job. The camping that comes with explorationt is also rewarding but comes with its share of challenges, which make you appreciate how divorced from nature we have become. A lot of my fieldwork has been in the La Amistad world heritage site, where the absence of roads, settlements and steep terrain mean that most of the park’s 4,000 km² remain totally unexplored.

Two of our water sources. Left, a muddy depression at the edge of a bog. Right, a dammed stream with a section of hollow stem as a pipe.

The biggest challenges are establishing routes, finding water and maintaining a supply line for food and specimens. We need  water for drinking, cooking, and occasionally, washing. Given the  high rainfall in wet tropical forests such as these it is probably surprising to think of water as being hard to find. The steep terrain and well developed root-mat, however, mean that much of the rain is absorbed or runs off very quickly and so we are often limited to where we can set up camp.

Our kitchen and the essential coffee sock

Although we have a GPS, maps for the area are not of sufficient resolution for us to orientate ourselves accurately beneath the canopy. We therefore rely on line-of-sight observations of sometimes quite distant landmarks, such as a hilltops or large rivers. We then have to guesstimate the best way to locate a ridge that will take us to where we need to go. It is much easier to follow ridges up and down, going from one to another where they intersect, than to hike into and then out of a series of treacherously steep valleys. Where we do need to cross a valley and river then it is important to choose the right place to cross. The dense forest and very slopes mean that you cannot see the river until very close. Choose the wrong place and you can find yourself at the top of a 20 m cliff overlooking an unpassable gorge. Our guide, Elio Altamirano, had an ingenious way for doing this. He would descend a ridge at an oblique angle until we could hear the river below, at this point he would guage that we were above a very steep gorge that was amplifying the sound upwards and so we would continue on until we could no longer hear the river, at this point we would head down at another oblique angle and continue like this until we were close enough to identify a good crossing point.

Crossing the Tirbe river on two fallen trees. Wading across rivers can be hazardous making a convenient tree fall the best option

Collecting is a productive business. We average about 50 collections a day, each comprising five duplicates meaning we quickly accumulate bundles of specimens.  Far more than we could carry out ourselves. Camping for two to three weeks also makes it impossible to bring in enough food for the duration. For both these reasons we need to establish a supply line between us and the outside world. To do so we hire local people as porters so that they can bring in food and newspaper and leave with bags of specimens.

One of several bundles of pressed plants collected each day. In total a days collecting averages about 250 sheets

 

Exploring the Carribean flanks of the La Amistad National Park, Costa Rica

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At 2700 m above sea-level on the northern slopes of an un-named mountain. This elfin forest is very humid and any available space is rapidly colonised by liverworts and mosses

Costa Rican botanist Daniel Santamaría, guide Elio Altamirano, some very valiant porters and myself have just completed our latest exploration of the La Amistad binational park, the bulk of the Talamanca mountain range in Costa Rica and Panama. We made 529 collections of almost 300 species, several of which are new to science. Given that we collected between 2 and 7 duplicates of each collection that is over 2,000 sheets that we will need to dry, label, identify and distribute.  After almost three weeks hiking and camping in wet, muddy and cold conditions we had all lost a lot of weight, I lost 8 kg, and were exhausted. The justification for this trip is that together with the Darien in Panama, La Amistad remains one of the biggest tracts of largely unexplored forest in Central America. It is also home to some of the most beautiful forests in the World and dozens of undiscovered plant species remain.Despite being a world heritage site in recognition of its outstanding species-richness La Amistad has been largely abandoned by the Costa Rican and Panamanian authorities, and UNESCO’s World Heritage Commission. This has left it vulnerable to hydroelectric dams and mining.  We therefore hope that our collections and discoveries will help raise the Park’s profile within the scientific community and respective national authorities.

Oak forest at 2300 m above sea-level. The oak trees in the background reach 60 m in height, there is also a 40 m high Magnolia. The grass in the foreground (left) is Nuerolepis pittieri, a giant grass rarely collected in Costa Rica.

We had been planning this expedition for over two years with the Universidad Estatal a Distancia of Costa Rica (UNED), and were lucky enough to get financial support from UNED, the Bentham Moxon Trust and the Royal Horticultural Society. The main challenges were getting to our chosen locality given that maps of the area are based on aerial images and so of limited value for locating ridges and streams. Second we had to establish supply lines so that we could get food to our camps and our specimens out for drying. This meant that our valiant porters spent several hours a day hiking steep muddy paths or cutting trails through dense vegetation under the guidance of our guide Elio Altamirano. Very steep slopes, high rainfall and frequent tree-falls made our trails obstacle courses rather than paths, requiring a degree of acrobatics when hauling a heavily packed rucksack and long-arm pruners.

One of our many camps. This one at 2800 m above sea-level. We slept in the open but the ground was so wet and waterlogged that a plastic sheet was essential. Our guide, Elio Altamirano was very skilled at designing and erecting camps.

This combined with our limited budget meant that whilst we were able to inventory two unexplored valleys and an un-named mountain range, over an elevation range of 2,200 to 2,800 m. We were not, however, able to get to our target locality which would have required many more porters than we could afford or source. This is one of the risks of doing fieldwork in very remote areas on a relatively small budget and I would not consider this trip to have been a failure, not only did we make over 500 collections, almost certainly including some new to science, but we also undertook inventories in an hitherto unexplored area and documented some new records of threatened habitats for Costa Rica.

Daniel Santamaría standing by the Terbe river in Costa Rica.

Exploring a remote and unexplored part of Costa Rica’s La Amistad National Park

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The view from the top of Cerro Tararia. The area that we plan to explore is behind the ridge that traverses the  back of the image.

Since 2003 I have been working with colleagues in Costa Rica and Panama to document the diversity of one of the most species-rich and beautiful places in Central America, the La Amistad Binational Park. During this time I have lead ten expeditions, the last of which was in 2012 and that have resulted in the disovery of over 50 species of plant and amphibian and the collection of several thousand plant collections and a Checklist to the vascular plants of La Amistad. After a six year gap in which I have changed jobs, got married and had a son, we are about to go back. This time to explore an area whose biological diversity remains totally unexplored. It will be a big challenge for me. For a start it is a four day hike to get to our target area, there are no proper maps and we have had to clear a trail and locate a camp. The main challenge will be to not get lost in this very mountainous area. Also it will be very difficult to be away from my family for four weeks. We are prepared though and have local guides, a satellite phone and lots of food.

Our field site is just to the right of the cloud. Only a few kilometres from the Panama border. You can see the Cerros Tararias in the middle of the image about a third of the way from the bottom

The route starts at about 1200 m above sea-level on the Pacific slopes, goes up to 2400 m and through the majestic oak forests, then past the Cerros Tararia, three inselbergs that rise out of the forest, and down through a trail that we will cut, that drops down to about 1500 m and the confluence of two medium-sized rivers. Here we plan to set up a makeshift camp. Our team comprises Frank Gonzalez, by far the most effective expedition planner that I have worked with, and lecturer at the Costa Rican equivalent of the Open University, UNED, Costa Rican botanist, Daniel Santamaria who is the most gifted field botanist that I know, myself, and a team of porters, who will spend the whole time supplying our camp and taking specimens back to the park entrance. We hope to get 10 days solid collecting done. This will involve two techniques new to me, the use of a catapult to launch a rope and chainsaw chain across the branches of trees that we want to collect, and of a drone to capture footage of the surrounding area to get an idea of the surrounding vegetation and capture images of the forest.

A flower of Symplocos pittieriana Steyerm., a scarce but widely distributed tree above 2500 m asl.

Whilst we hope to discover several new species to science, our real aim is to collect new locality records for 200 or more species. These records will help us to better predict these species ranges and support their conservation. We were very lucky to get financial support from the Bentham Moxon Trust and the RHS.

Strange world of fleshy nettle fruits (Urticaceae)

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Top: Myrianthus arboreus, Debregeasia salicifolia, Poikilospermum suaveolens. Bottom: Dendrocnide meyeniana, Urera baccifera, Touchardia latifolia.

Brightly coloured or fleshy fruit are not what you would associate with nettles. Indeed neither would most botanists who study them in a herbarium where once brightly coloured intricately shaped structures are reduced to congealed dark brown blobs. It is thanks to field work, and the enthusiasm of many amateur naturalists and their cameras that their beauty and complexity is becoming better known. Fleshy-fruited nettles are found across the family, comprising probably 1/4 of the genera. Nettles are very inventive in producing these fruits, with stalks, petals, fruiting branches or bracts being re-purposed following flowering. Although I work on nettles and so am naturally biased, I can’t think of another plant family that has come up with so many ways to produce a tasty morsel for a bird or mammal, or which produces such complex shaped fruits.

Dendrocnide meyeniana, here brilliantly photographed in Taiwan by Flickr user ted762563. I have inserted arrows to highlight the tiny petals which later develop into the strange clasp-shaped fruit.

In the case of the tree from Taiwan and the Philippines, Discocnide meyeniana, the three tiny and unequal green petals around each ovary swell up into a ghostly white cradle which likely flags the exposed seed to potential dispersers. In this case likely a small bird. Another species with unusual fleshy fruits is a small tree from the Dominican Republic, Gyrotaenia microcarpa. In this species it is the fused flowering branches which become fleshy, expanding in fruit to leave the seeds exposed in small clusters on the outside, a bit like a misshapen strawberry.

Gyrotaenia microcarpa fruit. The fused flowering branches swell up and become white, the seeds becoming black creating a contrast which presumably attracts small birds or mammals to feed.

In several species fruits designed to attract consumers also have stinging hairs. This is the case of the Latin American shrub Urera baccifera. In this species, not only do the tiny green petals become white and swell up to conceal the seed, but their flowering branches and stalks become bright magenta and fleshy, curling protectively over the white berries brandishing hypodermic stinging hairs. This suggests that not any animal is welcome to take the fruit. Whatever feeds on the berry will need to delicately free it  without getting stung.

Urera baccifera, common throughout Latin America and well known for its brightly coloured but also stinging fruit clusters.

Probably the strangest looking fruit is that of Procris, a group of succulent species from Asia, the Pacific and Africa. In these plants the flower stalks all fuse to form a swollen foot. In fruit, together with the reduced petals at the ovary’s base, this becomes fleshy and when wet the whole structure is covered by a thick slime. It is hard to imagine what kind of animal this fruit is aiming to attract!

Procris wightiana from Southeast Asia. The cup-like structures at the base of the seeds are the reduced petals that have fused and become fleshy.

 

I hope that this very brief and subjective survey of nettle fruits demonstrates how innovative and surprising plants (and nettles in particular) can be.

Lost world discovered in twilight of Chinese caves

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Elatostema obscurinervium growing in stalagmite drip zones, one of 31 species known only from caves in China and Vietnam.

I never expected to be working in caves, that is, until I started to study nettles in Southwest China with Guangxi botanist Wei Yi-Gang. When Wei suggested that we collect in a local cave I was not hopeful. However, that first visit transported me to another world, an eerie moonscape in which plants thrived in powdery ‘soil’ and perpetual twilight. I was immediately gripped and determined to explore as many caves as possible. Over the next few years we visited over 60 caves, travelling on underground rivers, hiking across rice fields or sneaking into big tourist caves. Each time I got the same thrill from entering these strange and silent places. This has culminated in a paper just published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

Yangtse cave, Fengshan County, Guangxi. Eight species new to science have been described from here.

There has been very little research on plants in caves. Having come across such a widespread and diverse flora we wanted to make sure that both botanists and cave biologists were aware of it. This is because plants growing in caves could tell us a lot about how plants adapt to extreme conditions. Also, as to how connected caves are to the surrounding landscape and each other. To do so we set out to answer a series of questions. Probably the most obvious was, are plants growing in light levels distinct to those outside? Did the species evolve in caves? Or are they survivors of a previous vegetation that at some time connected caves? And, are these plants important for conservation in the region? For example, in the restoration of the karst forests lost during the 20^thC.

Cave converted to a tourist attraction.

There are thousands of caves in Southwest China and the landscape that they helped form has long been famous in Chinese culture and art. A landscape covered in dense forest until the 20^thC at which time the ‘Great leap forward’ and later the ‘Cultural revolution’ resulted in massive deforestation. Once cut, the forest has not returned but instead been replaced dry scrub. The 21^stC has brought new threats from cement and tourism. The rock that forms these caves is used to make cement, now in high demand, that combined with a rapid growth in tourism has meant once untouched ‘lost worlds’ are being mined or filled with walkways, bright lights and litter.

Collaborators from the Guangxi Institute of Botany, Fu Longfei and Chen Xiaoqin taking photosynthesis measurements.

We found that some of the plants growing in caves are surviving in very low levels of light. Levels much lower than previously known. From other cave studies we also know that daily changes in temperature and humidity are very small. There is also some suggestion from other studies that the cave atmosphere may be richer in CO2. It could be that low levels of light are being offset by more stable conditions and higher CO2 – an interesting question for future research.

We also found that whilst most of the plants we document are known from forest habitats elsewhere, 31 species are only known from caves. For reasons given in our paper we do not believe that this means that they evolved in caves but rather that they are species which were restricted to the forests lost in the 20^thC.

So, it looks as if the plants that we are finding in caves are relics of forests that were lost to deforestation in the 1950s and 1970s. With a current focus on restoring these lost forests in China, these surviving populations could now become a valuable source of local plant material for restoration.

Yin Jia cave close to Gu Lin village in Yunnan. At 1600 m above sea-level this is also one of highest elevations that we have collected in caves.

Other posts by me on this topic

2016: Studying cave-plants in SW China

2014: Caves explored last month

 

Checklist to the plants of La Amistad National Park published!

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The field team from one of nine expeditions to La Amistad that formed the source of some of the records.

Finally, and after many years of fieldwork, identification, writing, checking, editing and correcting our checklist to the vascular pants of La Amistad Binational Park, produced by a team of Costa Rican and Panamanian botanists, and myself, has been published! It has been a challenging and protracted undertaking which at several times I thought would never be completed and special thanks go to a very patient and dedicated editor, Maarten Christenhusz. Checklists are generally not highly regarded in scientific circles as they are effectively lists of what has been documented at  particular place. They are though, incredibly important as they represent verified and falsifiable lists synthesising data from several sources and are often the building blocks of other scientific research and much more highly cited publications. They also provide a baseline for conservation and future exploration.

View across a small portion of the park from Cerro Asidbeta in 2012

La Amistad itself is a UNESCO World Heritage property and Binational Park shared by Costa Rica and Panama. It covers about 4,000 km2 and contains an incredible 3,046 species of vascular plants, of which 73 are found nowhere else. This makes La Amistad one of the most species-rich places on earth for vascular plants and of great importance for conservation. Part of the reason for this high diversity is the number of contrasting habitats from Paramo, natural grasslands to evergreen oak forest, cloud forest and tropical wet forest.

Vaccinium bocatorense Wilbur (heather family), one of 73 species known only from La Amistad.

The plan to do a checklist to the park followed several years of field exploration undertaken as part of Flora Mesoamericana and then a Darwin Initiative project to generate baseline information for the park’s management. This involved hiking and camping for two to three weeks at a time and was some of the most exhilirating fieldwork that I have done. Once we had our collections identified we then used inventories of local herbaria in Costa Rica and Panama, existing taxonomic treatments combined with reliable online resources such as Tropicos to compile a more exhaustive list.  We then compared this to a vegetation map which we had produced and elevation ranges from specimen labels to associate each species with a particular vegetation type and in the interests of verifiability we cite all of the known colections of each species made in the park.  I am sure there are several errors waiting to be uncovered in the list but despite this, and its relatively low impact factor, it is probably the paper that I am most proud of having been involved with. Firstly because for several years I feared it would never get finished, and secondly because most of the authors are Costa Rican or Panamanian.

Our field laboratory in 2008 in the Rio Frio sector of Panamanian La Amistad.

Royal Society Pairing Scheme: science inside the UK Government

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I was incredibly lucky to be paired with Dr Nichola Spence, Chief Plant Health Officer at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (@plantchief). Image courtesy of the Royal Society.

As a scientist employed for all of my career in institutions partially funded by the British state it might seem that I would have a good understanding of how the UK Government gets the scientific information it needs and what science goes on within it. The reality is that I had very little idea, based on a few assumptions, what I read in the media, and not very flattering television series such as The Thick of it. It was because of this, and an interest in how the science I and my colleagues do might influence policy, that I applied for the Royal Society Pairing Scheme. The scheme involves a scientist being paired with an MP or Civil Servant. The scientist spends two days shadowing their pair, preceded by  an introduction to Westminster and followed by a half day of seminars on science in government. I can honestly say that it was one of the best things I have done! Not just because I was paired with a very dynamic and welcoming Chief Plant Officer at Defra but because the whole experience gave me far greater confidence and belief in Government, as we enter a turbulent time for our Country and the World.

An entry from the new Plant Health Portal showing a summary of the information available on one of the most threatening pests of plants, the bacterium Xylella fastidiosa.

I was very impressed by the quality of the science and engagement that takes place at the UK Plant Health laboratories near York. Also with the dedicated and friendly atmosphere. On our first day the agency launched the UK Plant Health Information Portal, a searchable database of the highest risk plant pest and diseases to UK farming, horticulture and forestry that includes over 900 reported pests that are scanned Worldwide. On our second day I was able to sit-in on the Plant Health Forum, a forum between government, trade bodies, NGOs such as the Woodland Trust and the Forestry Commission which meets regularly to discuss new concerns, pests and solutions. It was a very open and frank meeting and not really what I expected from Government.

One half of the 2016 Royal Society Pairing scheme scientist intake at Westminster. Image courtesy of Farah Ahmed.

Our science in government seminars provided an overview of how Government gets scientific information and the contrasts between the executive, Members for Parliament (MPs) and Members of the Lords. Government has three well established and connected sources of scientific information, advisors and an extensive network of contacts in academia. In contrast, MPs, who have very little time and minimal administrative support depend on their researchers to source scientific information. Unfortunately, the researchers themselves are very poorly paid and often recent graduates who stay a few months before moving on to another job and also have very little time themselves. The result is that MPs are very poorly briefed compared to civil servants and the executive. The Lords, fit somewhere in-between the two, having more time to devote to sourcing information but little dedicated support. This might be one of the reasons that the Royal Society started the pairing scheme sixteen years ago which I feel very privileged to have participated in.

Studying cave plants in SW China

Yangtse cave, Fengshan County, Guangxi, type locality for eight species of plant. The plant-bearing part of the cave is ca 170 m deep and 70 m wide (note the person for scale)

As part of my research on the nettle family, Urticaceae I became aware of plants growing in the entrance caverns of caves several years ago and for over a year now my collaborators at the Guangxi Institute of Botany, China lead by Professor Yigang Wei and I have been working on documenting the full diversity of this unusual flora. This lead us to think about whether these plants may have become adapted to life in caves, in particular the relatively constant climate and low light. Especially for species which grow amongst the lowest light levels at the back of caverns where they are growing in a fraction of the light they could be expected to receive in a forest. We therefore applied for a grant from the Guangxi Key Laboratory of Plant Conservation and Restoration Ecology in Karst Terrain, and the Foreign Experts Bureau to undertake some preliminary work to document the climate, light and photosynthesis of the plants in the caves.

Fu Longfei and Chen Xiaoqin taking photosynthesis measurements using an instrument called a handheld PAM which uses fluorescence to measure various aspects of photosynthesis.

We selected the Yangtse cave as we know the diversity of plants that grow there (ten species of nettle alone), we have three data-loggers recording temperature and humidity in it and it is close to a town where we can spend the night. It is also a spectacular and beautiful place to spend several days working. The aim of our work was to collect the data necessary to test the hypothesis that the plants growing within the entrance cavern of the Yangtse cave exhibit different photosynthetic performance than the same or congeneric species growing outside of the cave. To do this we randomly selected individuals of three species of nettle in the genus Elatostema, one species of Begonia and a species of fern at four different locations in the cave, the back, midway into the entrance cavern, at the entrance and outside of the cave. We also brought two species of Elatostema from the living collection at the Guangxi Institute of Botany to compare their photosynthesis performance with members of the same species that had grown up within the cave. This was to get some indication as to how plastic their response was.

Elatostema obscurinervium, one of 31 species known only from caves and recently collected from a cave in northern Vietnam.

Each plant was connected to a hand-held PAM chlorophyll fluorometer, an incredibly sensitive device that can measure several key outputs of photosynthetic reactions in the chloroplasts as they take place. By comparing our study plants to those growing outside of the cave and from the scientific literature we hope to see whether cave-dwelling plants differ from non-cave plants in some of those parameters, and whether those differences are dependent upon what kind of plant they are. These parameters include the efficiency of photosynthesis, that is how much of the light energy is harnessed by the photosynthetic reactions, how much is dissipated and how resilient the photosynthetic apparatus is to changing light intensity. If we find  a difference between cave and non-cave dwelling plants then taken together these measurements can provide some indication of which group of photosynthetic reactions are leading to these differences.

Reforestation in Haiti, the value of botanical knowledge

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Sadhana Forest Haiti staff and volunteers planting Brosimum alicastrum seedlings in the compound of an Anse-a-Pitre smallholder

Haiti is infamous for extensive deforestation, less tha 4% of its original forest cover remains, which in addition to threatening many of its endemic trees with extinction has also increased the destructive impact of natural disasters of which there have been several in the last couple of decades. Deforestation is widely recognized as a significant threat to the well-being and security of Haitians and as a consequence many projects have been set up to plant trees, some more successful than others. Probably the biggest challenge to reforestation is to ensure that the communities involved are engaged and that they feel that the benefits of protecting and looking after a tree outweigh the sacrifice involved in not converting it to charcoal for cooking. Charcoal is the main fuel in rural areas and demand for it is high, a small bucket costing up to US$2 leading people to burn cacti to produce it. One NGO which seems to have been successful in engaging rural communities to grow and protect useful tree species has been Sadhana Forest Haiti

5 litre containers of charcoal can be found at most local shops. Charcoal is produced from local trees and represents the main source of fuel for cooking and so essential.

One of the difficulties for NGOs reforesting in any country is access to the scientific information necessary to make choices about what is grown: will a species grow in the chosen sites? How quickly will it grow? Will local people recognise it as a species of value to be protected? Will it support livelihoods? Where can seed be obtained from? How does it germinate? Is it native? What is its conservation value? This information can be tricky to get hold of, especially in countries with little botanical capacity or knowledge repositories. Often the result is that the species selected are those for which seed can be obtained and that are very well known to be of livelihood value, normally non-native species such as avocado, mango, eucalyptus of little conservation or biodiversity value but highly recognizable. Some native and especially endemic species for which knowledge of livelihood value is likely to be restricted to older members of a community or a small number of botanists and whose propagation and germination requirements are less well known will be harder for NGOs to incorporate.

Sadhana’s community liaison officer, Nixon Casseus, discussing fruiting of a 4 year-old Brosimum alicastrum with the owner of a small-holding who has been looking after the tree

RBG Kew has been working in neighboring Dominincan Republic for several years and has developed a strong relationship with the Dr. Rafael Moscoso National Botanical Garden, an institution with an active botanical community and seed bank. This represents an opportunity to share some of the knowledge and expertise on additional potential native plants with Sadhana Forest and the households that they work with. To this end I spent a few days visiting Sadhana Forest Haiti and some of the households. I was struck with the commitment and planning behind Sadhana Forest, who with few resources have provided several thousand seedlings to thousands of households in a region spanning Haiti’s south eastern border with the Dominican Republic. Hopefully, in collaboration with the Dr. Rafael Moscoso National Botanical Garden and Kew we will be able to introduce more native species of livelihood value to be planted in the future.

The Sadhana Forest compound at Anse-a-Pitre, Haiti.