Garden Scientists Explore Biodiversity in Australia, Brazil, and Colombia

As environmental pressures increasingly put biodiversity at risk, one of the Garden’s most important goals is to lead in the effort to document every plant and fungal species on Earth. Garden scientists conduct research around the globe. Here are three recent reports from the field.

Roy Halling Returns to Fraser Island, Australia

In late March, Roy Halling, Ph.D., a specialist in mushrooms, continued his survey of macrofungi on Fraser Island, the largest of the world’s sand islands and a World Heritage Site off the east coast of Queensland, Australia. There he and Nigel Fechner, a Senior Botanist at the Queensland Herbarium in Brisbane, found an undescribed genus of “false-truffle,” previously known only from Cape York, the northernmost part of Queensland. They discovered the fungus (pictured), about the size of a golf ball, protruding from a sand bank near Lake McKenzie. Scratching with a truffle rake in the sand and litter under a gum tree (Eucalyptus signata), they unearthed more of the bright red fungus. Like the truffle of commerce, this fungus has a strong penetrating odor, one of the key factors in attracting marsupials, which eat the fungus and disperse the spores in their scat.

The real gems for Halling on this trip were finding an exquisite species of Strobilomyces and a first report from Australia of a Heimioporus japonicus. This is the second known instance of a species in that genus in Australia.

Wayt Thomas Joins Partners in Brazil
Wayt Thomas, Ph.D., studies tropical American forests, especially the Atlantic forests of Brazil, one of the world’s biodiversity “hotspots.” He spent February in Brazil, working with colleagues from the Federal University of Paraiba and four other Brazilian universities studying the plants found in one of the most critically endangered rain forests in the world.

Two of the reserves Thomas visited on this trip protect submontane forests—moist forests at elevations of 1,300–2,600 feet. These two reserves are home to some of the world’s rarest birds, including the Alagoas Antwren, the Alagoas Foliage-gleaner, the Alagoas Tyrannulet, and the Orange-bellied Antwren. By comparing submontane forests with similar avifauna, he hopes to predict the occurrence of these rare birds in other areas.

Douglas Daly Travels to Colombia
Douglas Daly, Ph.D., returned to Colombia in January for the first time in 20 years to pursue his studies of the tropical tree family Burseraceae. He consulted eight herbaria in three cities and identified and annotated some 4,000 Burseraceae specimens in order to complete his treatment of the family for Colombia’s national flora checklist. Daly was able to secure permission to work in two localities on the western side of the Andes where small areas of primary forest remain. Although Colombia was in the grip of a severe drought, he collected more than 16 distinct species of Burseraceae, two of which he had never seen before, a tribute to the dizzying plant diversity of Colombia.

Carol Capobianco is Editorial Content Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.

With the recent wet weather you may have noticed that mushrooms are, well, mushrooming—in moist areas of your garden, on a pile of mulch, in a nearby woodland.

Here at the Botanical Garden, from the end of June to the first frost you may see Dr. Roy Halling, Curator of Mycology, walking about the grounds after a significant rainfall in search of his favorite subject. He has dedicated his life’s work to studying mushrooms. “I want to know what they are, where they grow, and how they are related to each other.”

The casual observer can see about 40 to 50 different types of mushrooms at the Garden over the course of the season. Roy’s top three spots are Twin Lakes, the bottom of Azalea Way, and the Arthur and Janet Ross Conifer Arboretum. At the base of pines and oaks are the best places to look because of the symbiotic relationship between the roots of these trees and mushrooms.

Although, after almost 25 years on staff at the Garden, he knows where to look, he’s not always certain what he’ll find. “I search near Twin Lakes and used to find mushrooms there. The oak tree is still there, but there are different mushrooms now. The others either aren’t there or they’ve moved.”

Moved? Yes, mushrooms will travel—or actually not return and appear elsewhere—according to their nutrient needs.

Roy travels, too. He’s been to many parts of the world and has co-authored a guide to mushrooms of Costa Rica, but his specialty has been researching the fungi (the group to which mushrooms belong) of Australia and Southeast Asia. His current project, with a grant from the National Geographic Society, is to explore for and document the mushrooms on the world’s largest sand island, Fraser Island, north of Brisbane. Roy has found that fungi provide the nutrients for the survival of the rain forest that otherwise implausibly exists on this island.

Learn more about Roy and his work with mushrooms after the jump. read more »