Jim Miller is Dean and Vice President for Science.

Herison de Oliveira (left) and Fabián Michelangeli look for plants as they descend the Jordao River by canoe.
All photos by Fabián A. Michelangeli, Ph.D.

The Amazon basin, which spans nine South American countries, is the largest connected block of tropical rain forest in the world. Despite the efforts of explorers over several centuries, large parts of Amazonia remain completely unexplored, and some of these places where scientists have never been are thousands of square miles in extent.

In early February, Fabián Michelangeli, Ph.D., of The New York Botanical Garden and his Brazilian collaborator, Renato Goldenberg, Ph.D., from the Universidad Federal do Paraná, coordinated a 16-day trip into one of these unexplored regions, and their results tell us how very much remains to be discovered in one of the world’s most important ecosystems.

Edilson de Oliveira collects a liana in the Bignoniaceae family growing on a tree on the river bank.

After long flights from New York to Sao Paulo then Brasilia and finally Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon basin, Fabián met up with Renato and the other research scientists who would join their group: Pedro Acevedo, Ph.D., from the Smithsonian Institution and C. Flavio Obermuller, Edilson de Oliveira, and undergraduate student Herison de Oliveira, all from the Universidade Federal do Acre. A two-hour flight in a small plane brought them to Foz de Jordao, the capital of a 2,100-square-mile municipality from which no plant collections had ever been made.

With the gracious provision of logistical support from the Mayor of Foz de Jordao, numerous short trips were made traveling upstream on the Taruaca and Jordao rivers, penetrating unexplored areas and hiking deep into the forests for four days. The expedition concluded with a seven-day trip down the Jordao river for about 185 miles, with daily incursions into the forests. Although this region had never been explored scientifically, about 6,000 people live in the municipality, mostly on small farms and cattle ranches that punctuate the forest, and they have established forest trails for rubber tapping. The botanical expedition members benefited from this trail network, which allowed them to use the boat on the river as a base—where they could establish a camp but then penetrate the forests for significant distances to collect plants during the day, and return to their river camp in the evening and process the day’s collections before collapsing into their hammocks at night.

Read more about the trip… read more »