In telling the tale of one of the great Amazonian explorers, C.V. von Martius, I wrote that, “… Martius was carrying with him 20,000 botanical specimens which served, and continue to serve, as the basis for countless botanical studies, including Flora Brasiliensis which remains the only published complete Flora of Brazil to this day.” To clarify, I was not suggesting that Flora Brasiliensis contains all Brazilian species, but that it is the only Brazilian Flora that included all documented plant species in Brazil at the time of its writing. In fact, there are at least twice as many species known in Brazil today as there were back then!
Scott A. Mori is the Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany at the The New York Botanical Garden. His research interests are the ecology, classification, and conservation of tropical rain forest trees. His most recent book is Tropical Plant Collecting: From the Field to the Internet.
Portrait of C. F. von Martius
Botanist Alex Popovkin was inspired to carry on the tradition of botanical field work–photographing and collecting plants in Brazil–by one magnificent book , Flora Brasiliensis.
Alex Popovkin botanizing in a forest fragment in Bahia, Brazil.
Studying plants in the field is the best way to acquire knowledge about them. Unfortunately, when a specialist does not live where the plants grow, it is difficult to study them in situ. In this modern age, the availability of digital photography and the internet makes it possible for local botanists to collect and photograph plants, then send the data and images to specialists. Although I prefer to see plants in their natural environments, new technology yields information that I could never have collected on my own!
One of my collaborators is Alex Popovkin, a Russian-born editor who works remotely from his small cabin in rural Bahia, Brazil. Alex has been passionate about plants since kindergarten, where he made daily observations of the development of a potted nasturtium planted by his teacher. He also observed the house plants his father cultivated on window sills in their St. Petersburg home. As a high school student in the early ’60s, Alex cared for tropical plants, and among other tasks penciled their Latin names on wooden labels at the Botanic Garden of the University of St. Petersburg as part of his work-study curriculum. His first botany mentor there was Dmitri Zalessky, the garden’s director at the time.
A view of the megalopolis of Sâo Paulo from the Botanical Garden.
When I was in Brazil to attend a meeting on Amazonian Biodiversity in São Paulo I also had the opportunity to visit one of The New York Botanical Garden‘s sister institutions, the Jardim Botânico de São Paulo. Just like NYBG, the São Paulo garden is a refuge from the traffic, heat, and noise of life within one of the world’s megacities. São Paulo is the eighth largest city in the world with 11 million inhabitants, and the city’s 588 square miles of paved surfaces can make it feel much hotter than the reported temperature. During my visit, temperatures ranged from a pleasant 68º to a high of 90º. In the open areas of the garden it was hot enough to dampen my t-shirt as I headed for a remnant patch of Atlantic coastal forest, but upon entering the forest the temperature dropped significantly and I cooled off. I was then able to begin enjoying the plants surrounding me.
The Garden was established in 1920 under the directorship of Frederico Carlos Hoehne. The area was originally the location of the city’s waterworks and the original gate built in 1894 is preserved on the Garden’s grounds. Today the Garden consists of 85 acres of formal gardens and an arboretum dedicated to growing trees native to São Paulo and Brazil, in addition to the 1,210 acres of remnant forest mentioned above.
Scott A. Mori, Ph.D., Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany has been studying New World rain forests for The New York Botanical Garden for nearly 35 years. He has witnessed an unrelenting reduction in the extent of the forests he studies and, as a result, is dedicated to preserving the diversity of plants and animals found there.
The wilted flowers of the four o’clock plant at 11 a.m.
At the time of this writing, I am in São Paulo Brazil to attend a multinational meeting of scientists, each participating in a study of the plants and animals of the Amazon Basin. I arrived the day before the meeting, and had time to walk through the area around the hotel, exploring for weeds and cultivated plants. No matter where I travel, even in the largest cities, there are plants to enjoy. When I spot one I know, it is like running into an old friend and trying to remember his or her name.
First, I try to identify the family the plant belongs to, followed by the genus, and finally the species. After recalling its name, I study the plant to find out if there is something about it I have not seen before. The secret to discovering new information about a plant is to study it carefully through a hand lens–I prefer one that magnifies the flower, fruit, and seed parts by up to ten times their normal size. Finding a plant that I do not know provides an even more exciting encounter, but that will be left for another post.
Wayt Thomas, Ph.D., is the Elizabeth G. Britton Curator of Botany in the Institute of Systematic Botany.
Editor’s note: Botanical Garden scientist Dr. Wayt Thomas has been filing reports from the field in northeastern Brazil, where he has studied the flora of the Atlantic coastal forest for 20 years. Read his earlier posts from this trip.
Wednesday, 12 May (Continued): We went back to Serra Grande and had dinner with Daniel; we went to the central plaza in town and had acarajé, a Bahian specialty with African origins, and not for the diet conscious. It is a dumpling made of chickpea meal deep-fried in dendê (African oil palm) oil. After it is fried, it is split open and slathered with a combination of other Bahian specialties, including dried shrimp, salad, vatapá (another dish of African origin made of bread pudding with shrimp, coconut milk, peanuts and cashews), and hot pepper paste.
Thursday, 13 May: Today we started for the town of Jequié, but with a planned detour on the way. Leaving Serra Grande, we headed north toward the beach resort town of Itacaré, and then over the new bridge crossing the Rio de Contas (Pebble River). We turned east toward the Marau Peninsula, an area of intense beachfront development and, consequently, increasingly threatened native vegetation. The sandy savannas near the coast are called restingas and harbor a fascinating array of species, some also found in Brazil’s central highlands, others unique to Marau. In some cases, the restinga sands support forests—these, too, are home to fascinating species such as Griffinia espiritense, a lily with beautiful green-and-pink mottled leaves, or the strange Anthurium bromelicola, a slender vine that grows only out of the center of terrestrial tank bromeliads.
The town of Jequié is at the western edge of the coastal forest, at the boundary between forest and dry thorn scrub known as caatinga (it means “white forest,” which is what it looks like when it has lost its leaves). One of our collaborators, Dr. Guadalupe Macedo, is a professor at the State University of Southern Bahia, in Jequié. We drove the four hours west from Marau to Jequié to meet with her to discuss our joint project.
Scott A. Mori, Ph.D., Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany, has been studying New World rain forests for The New York Botanical Garden for over 30 years. Over the course of his career, Dr. Mori has witnessed an unrelenting reduction in the extent of the tropical forests he studies.
On August 22, an image showing a small green patch of forest in the midst of a treeless area prepared for soybean cultivation appeared on the front page of The New York Times. The accompanying article explained that the fertile soils underlying forests in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, are suitable for supporting large soybean plantations. As evidence of the magnitude of the forest destruction, the author noted that an increasing demand for Brazilian soybeans led to the conversion of 700 square miles of forest to soybean fields in that state during the last five months of 2007 alone!
The future of plant and animal diversity in Latin American forests depends on an understanding of how fragile the plant/animal interactions of tropical ecosystems are and the role human consumption plays in altering natural ecosystems. The relationships between plants and animals in the tropics are so closely co-evolved that man’s utilization of tropical forests almost always results in some loss of biodiversity. Soybean cultivation is an extreme example, because in this agricultural system soybeans entirely displace the plants and animals that formerly occupied the destroyed forests.
Trees remaining after forest destruction such as the Brazil nut tree above, photographed by W. W. Thomas, do not effectively reproduce. While this tree and others like it may still live for many years, they no longer produce the next generation of trees because the forest conditions needed for the pollination of their flowers, the dispersal of their seeds, and the growth of their seedlings into adult trees no longer exist.
John Mitchell is a Research Fellow with the Institute of Systematic Botany at The New York Botanical Garden, where he also chairs the Library Committee. He studies the cashew family (Anacardiaceae) worldwide.
The cashew tree (Anacardium occidentale), a native of Brazil, is the source of cashew nuts and the cashew apple. Wild cashew trees occur in the savannas and some coastal forests in northern South America, Brazil, and adjacent Bolivia and Paraguay. Portuguese colonists introduced the cashew from Brazil to their colonies in India and Africa in the late 1500s. Today cashew is cultivated throughout the lowland tropics of the world. The majority of people who live in the tropics use the cashew tree primarily for its cashew apple rather than for the seed (which you know as the cashew nut).
The seed is enclosed in a brown to gray fruit, often called the cashew nutshell, which contains a dermatitis-causing poisonous resin. This resin is chemically similar to that found in poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans), to which the cashew is closely related; they are both members of the same family (Anacardiaceae) along with other commercial crops, including pistachio, pink peppercorn, and mango.
Cashew nuts are roasted or eaten raw after careful separation from the poisonous shell (fruit); chemicals in the nutshell liquid are extracted to produce adhesives, lubricants, solvents, plastics, and antimicrobials. Brake linings of cars and particleboard are two products partially derived from cashew nutshell chemicals. Cashews are also used to make cashew butter, or as an ingredient in cakes, cookies, and candies. Large-scale commercial cashew production is done in Brazil, tropical Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.
The cashew apple is a pear-shaped juicy structure that subtends the fruit and is actually the swollen flower/fruit stalk (pedicel) called a hypocarp. (Above is a photo of an immature cashew fruit and hypocarp developing on a tree, taken by Susan K. Pell, BBG.) The cashew apple can be candied or its juice fermented to make wine or spirits, or it can be used as an ice cream flavoring. The “apple” attracts dispersers such as fruit bats, coatis (relatives of raccoons), monkeys, lizards, and various fruit-eating birds who discard the poisonous fruit and consume the cashew apple.
My apprenticeship with Garden senior curator Dr. Scott Mori in the early 1980s resulted in the publication of a monograph, The Cashew and Its Relatives (Anacardium: Anacardiaceae), published by NYBG Press. The cashew genus, Anacardium, was originally described by Linnaeus and includes 11 species native to South and Central America.
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Scott A. Mori, Ph.D., Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany, has been studying New World rain forests at The New York Botanical Garden for over 30 years. As part of The Edible Garden, he will hold informal conversations about chocolate, Brazil nuts, and cashews—some of his research topics—during Café Scientifique on August 13.
The chocolate that we eat and drink is one of the most complicated foods utilized by mankind. Not only did it co-evolve in the rain forests of the New World with still unidentified pollinators and with the help of animals that disperse its seeds, but it also undergoes an amazing transformation when it is processed, going from inedible, bitter seeds to the delicious chocolate products that most of us enjoy.
I became fascinated with the natural history and cultivation of chocolate while working for the Cocoa Research Institute in southern Bahia, Brazil, from 1978 to 1980. I directed a program of plant exploration in what was then, botanically, one of the least explored regions of the New World tropics. During those two years, I made 4,500 botanical collections, including many species new to science and many from cocoa plantations.
The scientific name of the chocolate tree is Theobroma cacao L. Theobroma means “food-of-the-gods” in Greek; cacao is derived from the Aztec common name chocolatl; and “L.” is the abbreviation for Linnaeus, the botanist who coined the scientific name of the chocolate tree. The genus Theobroma includes 22 species.
One of the unsolved mysteries of the natural history of chocolate trees is its pollinators. Most varieties of chocolate are self-incompatible, which means that pollination of the flowers of a given plant with pollen from the same plant does not yield fruit. There are, however, some varieties that are self-compatible—the single tree growing in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at NYBG is proof, because it sets fruit. Nevertheless, for most chocolate trees to produce fruit, pollen has to be moved from one tree to the next. This does not happen frequently in plantations, because the average tree produces between just 20 and 40 fruits each year from the thousands of flowers that open on the tree.
Thus, a limiting factor in the production of chocolate is successful pollination, and because this has economic implications there has been considerable research about how to increase the production of chocolate by enhancing pollination. Some researchers believe midges (minute, mosquito-like flies) are the pollinators of chocolate trees. But the complexity and relatively large size of chocolate flowers in comparison to the size of midges indicates that they might be occasional visitors rather than the true or only pollinators of chocolate.
Dr. Wayt Thomas holds a begonia he’s just collected in the montane tropical forest of the Serra Bonita Private Reserve in Bahia, Brazil.
Photo by Rogerio Reis/Black Star
During The Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern, Plant Talk takes a look at some of the research and conservation efforts of The New York Botanical scientists whose work is focused in Brazil. This interview was conducted by Jessica Blohm, Interpretive Specialist for Public Education.
Botanical Garden scientist Dr. Wayt Thomas knows first-hand the importance of his research in Brazil. A planned highway that would have cut through the sensitive Serra Grande Forest in coastal Bahia was diverted thanks, in part, to the identification by him and his Brazilian collaborators of 458 species in an inventory of 2,500 trees—one of the highest forest diversity levels ever recorded.
“Our data about the high diversity of this forest came out while [local officials] were in the planning stage for this highway/road project. The local NGO [non-governmental organization] got our data, and they ran with it,” Wayt says.
The impressive data led officials to change the path of the road from a straight shot through the forest to a park-like road following the contours of the land and avoiding big patches of forest. In addition, a state park was created to protect that section of the forest, one of the world’s most critically endangered rain forests. Less than 5 percent of the original forests in the region remain.
“I can do my science and really have an impact on local conservation,” Wayt says.
He frequently finds species that no one has ever studied before: In Bahia, 7 percent of the tree species his team has found were unnamed. Wayt suspects that the area supports such diversity because three or four different kinds of forest intersect there. “Seeds are going to go where they want to. So you have plants that are from one forest that end up in another type of forest. The populations mix,” he says.
Wayt specializes in research of the sedge family, especially the beaked rushes, and the Tree-of-Heaven family. “In this research, I define species concepts, describe species and genera new to science, and use molecular techniques to understand the evolution of each group,” he says.
He also heads the international Organization for Flora Neotropica, which promotes the preparation of systematic monographs of plants and fungi in the American tropics.
“I have been working in this region for at least 17 years. There is no end to stuff to do here,” Wayt says.
