While attending New England Grows—a regional tradeshow and educational forum that takes place in Boston each year—I was lucky enough to hear the ecologist and public spokesperson, Nalini Nadkarni, give a lecture on rain forest ecology and its importance as a biological system.
Dr. Nadkarni’s research was not conducted on the forest floor, but rather at great heights above it. She quite literally harnessed the tools of the arborist’s trade and hoisted herself and a team of researchers 100 feet up in the air to explore the biological communities that thrived in the upper layers of the rain forest’s canopy.
Up in the treetops, Nadkarni and her team found a surprising diversity. The plants they came upon were expected: orchids, bromeliads, ferns, mosses, and lichens. These epiphytic plants are an important component of tropical arboreal communities, surviving and thriving by collecting water and nutrients from rainfall trapped in their foliage. What surprised the researchers, however, was the complexity of the arboreal ecosystem.
Go out into your back yard (assuming you have one) and pretend you have to not only identify, but describe, designate, and catalog every plant that’s growing there. Now multiply that challenge by the entire surface of the Earth, and you’re standing in a botanist’s shoes. Of course, it’s not going to be as easy as all that; as a plant scientist, you’re also racing against a clock that stubbornly speeds up with each passing year. Climate change, human development, and myriad other influences are wiping out species before you’re even aware they’re under threat–and there are hundreds ofthousands of species to account for. Worse, the system you use to designate these plants as endangered isn’t exactly marching to the beat of your own drum.
This is where The New York Botanical Garden‘s experts step in, with a new system that could turn a challenging outlook for botanical conservationists into a bright future.
Dr. Wayne Law is a postdoctoral research associate with The New York Botanical Garden, while Dr. Michael J. Balick serves as Vice President for Botanical Science, as well as Director and Philecology Curator with the Institute of Economic Botany. Together, their studies on the ecosystems of Micronesia have spanned over ten years.
Conservationists discuss the impact of clearing upland forests in Micronesia.
Approximately two thousand miles southwest of Hawaii are the thousands of small islands that make up the area known as Micronesia. Identified as one of the world’s 25 biodiversity hotspots, the region boasts one of the highest rates of endemism, or plants found nowhere else in the world. The central group of these islands is known as the Caroline Islands, and the high islands (volcanic in origin) of Pohnpei and Kosrae are the easternmost of this group.
Over ten years ago, we started working in Pohnpei where we saw a similar pattern on these islands to what is happening throughout the world: modernization is leading to the loss of traditional knowledge as it is no longer being passed on to the younger generations.
The 50-acre, old growth Native Forest is the heart of the Garden. It is one of the reasons Nathaniel Lord Britton settled on this 250-acre plot in the Bronx as the place to build his dream Botanical Garden, it is home to at least one tree that was alive at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is home to some of the Garden’s most fascinating residents, it is a place where scientists can study everything from global warming to genetics, and it is a very fine place to go for a stroll. The Forest is a vital part of not just the New York Botanical Garden, but also of New York City, and the world.
For these reasons, and for so many more, we are delighted that the United Nations has declared 2011 “The International Year of Forests.” The UN says that the year is a “celebration of the vital role that forests play in people’s lives … amid growing recognition of the role that forests managed in a sustainable manner play in everything from mitigating climate change to providing wood, medicines and livelihoods for people around the world.”
We’ll be joining in on recognizing the International Year of Forests with a series of events throughout 2011 (but we’re not ready to announce them just yet). In the meantime, here are some other forest facts from the United Nations:
During the past 15 years, my staff and I have devoted a great deal of effort in the creation of the C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium, which is an on-line catalog of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium. Entries in the Virtual Herbarium are created by transcribing the data from the specimen label into an electronic database, and often capturing a digital image of the specimens as well.
We have digitized just over 1 million of our 7.3 million specimens so far. Although we don’t know exactly what objective drives each of the 8,400 daily visits to the Virtual Herbarium, we deduce from reviewing the sources of these “hits” that most users are seeking basic biodiversity information.
Scientists have extended the barcode of life to plants, a development that will have far reaching impacts in the years ahead.
Earlier this month, an international consortium of plant scientists achieved a milestone when they published the results of a multi-year analysis selecting two regions of DNA to serve as barcodes for the identification of plants. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The goal of using a standard segment of a gene as a unique identifier of all living organisms has worked better for animals than for plants, as a gene from the mitochondrial genome, cytochrome oxidase I or COI, is sufficiently different among animal species to allow unique identification of 95% of species. Since this gene is not highly variable in plants, 52 scientists from 24 institutions in nine countries have worked for several years to identify genetic sequences that can routinely be sequenced without ambiguous results and that differ enough to allow discrimination of species. The group selected two genes from the chloroplast genome, rbcL and matK, which together total about 1,450 base pairs.
Agreement on these barcode genes will pave the way to building the reference database necessary to assign barcode sequences to species. The use of barcodes will have tremendously broad impact both in the research community and also with many practical applications. Barcode sequences have in numerous instances helped identify species new to science and improve our understanding of diversity in the natural world. But more importantly it will enable plants that could formerly be identified only by increasingly rare experts with specific plant families to be identified by technicians, enabling broad ecological surveys. At a more practical level, it will support the identification of fragmentary plant materials in poison control centers and in other forensic applications, and allow accurate identification of ingredients in food and dietary supplements.
An ambitious effort to assemble barcodes for all of the trees of the world is being coordinated by The New York Botanical Garden, and it will ultimately facilitate better monitoring of the world timber trade. This international partnership will take years to complete its goal, but in the short term, enough sequence data has been collected already to identify the family to which most plants belong, and in many cases the genus as well. Timber harvesters will be much less likely to cut endangered timber species if they know that this technology may allow buyers to identify these species and refuse to accept and pay for them. Ultimately, barcoding will affect our lives in many ways by providing a method for the identification of the millions of species that inhabit our planet.
Please help support important botanical research such as this that is integral to the mission of The New York Botanical Garden.
While attending New England Grows—a regional tradeshow and educational forum that takes place in Boston each year—I was lucky enough to hear the ecologist and public spokesperson, Nalini Nadkarni, give a lecture on rain forest ecology and its importance as a biological system.
The 50-acre, old growth 
