Benjamin M. Torke, Ph.D., is an Assistant Curator at the Garden’s Institute of Systematic Botany. His specialty is legumes, a large plant family that includes not only beans and peanuts but also hundreds of rain forest tree species.
As I noted last week, most new species display at least one of the four characteristics, or “flavors.” My research on the tropical tree genus Swartzia has provided examples of each. In addition to rare species—the subject of the first post in this series—some species are restricted.
One subgroup of Swartzia, section Acutifoliae, is very diverse in the Atlantic coastal area of Eastern Brazil. While visiting the herbarium of the National Botanical Garden of Rio de Janeiro in 2007, I happened upon a specimen of this group from an area of coastal sand dunes in the Brazilian state of Bahia. With its thick leaflets rolled under at the margins, silky sepals, and bushy growth form, the specimen was unlike any of the previously described species. In 2009, I located a similar specimen in the collection at the Conservatory and Botanical Garden in Geneva, Switzerland, that also came from the same area of sand dunes.
Benjamin M. Torke, Ph.D., is an Assistant Curator at the Garden’s Institute of Systematic Botany. His specialty is legumes, a large plant family that includes not only beans and peanuts but also hundreds of rain forest tree species.
Julio León and Yoira Rivera Queralta encounter a single individual of the exceptionally rare Cuban endemic tree, Behaimia cubensis
Editor’s Note: President Obama’s recent announcement that the U.S. will normalize its relationship with Cuba has focused attention once again on Cuba, an island nation where scientists from The New York Botanical Garden have conducted expeditions and scientific research for more than a century. In this two-part series, a Botanical Garden scientist describes his recent two-week field trip to Cuba, part of an ongoing effort to discover and document the island’s richly varied plant life.
For the next leg of my August field trip to central Cuba, my colleagues and I traveled to the city of Cienfuegos on the southern coast. In Cienfuegos, we were joined by Julio León of the Botanical Garden of Cienfuegos, an expert on the flora of Cienfuegos Province. Julio took us to several highly productive collecting sites.
One of the most interesting habitats was the transition zone between a karst slope and a coastal mangrove swamp. Here we encountered one of the best finds of the whole trip, an individual of Behaimia cubensis, a very rare Cuban tree which is the only species of its genus. The evolutionary affinities of Behaimia are currently unknown, so I was very excited to collect material that could be used for DNA analysis.
Benjamin M. Torke, Ph.D., is an Assistant Curator at the Garden’s Institute of Systematic Botany. His specialty is legumes, a large plant family that includes not only beans and peanuts but also hundreds of rain forest tree species.
Editor’s Note: President Obama’s recent announcement that the U.S. will normalize its relationship with Cuba has focused attention once again on Cuba, an island nation where scientists from The New York Botanical Garden have conducted expeditions and scientific research for more than a century. In this two-part series, a Botanical Garden scientist describes his recent two-week field trip to Cuba, part of an ongoing effort to discover and document the island’s richly varied plant life.
Caesalpinia pauciflora, an uncommon species of the bean family
Earlier this year, I participated in a botanical expedition to Central Cuba. The purpose of the two-week trip was to visit a variety of natural habitats in that part of Cuba, an area with a diverse but understudied plant flora, and to collect herbarium specimens and samples for DNA studies of targeted species.
About half of Cuban plant species are endemic, meaning they occur only there, and many of them are highly endangered. The fieldwork would contribute to ongoing efforts to assess the current geographical distributions and conservation status of Cuban plant species and would provide critical material for studies on the systematics of particular plant groups. As The New York Botanical Garden’s curator of the legume family, Fabaceae, also known as the bean or pea family, I was particularly interested in collecting some rare and endemic species of beans.
Benjamin M. Torke, Ph.D., is an Assistant Curator at the Garden’s Institute of Systematic Botany. He is one of the leaders of a project to document the plant diversity of the Tapajos River basin in northern Brazil, an area roughly the size of France.
Threatened by deforestation, climate change, and high levels of poverty in local communities, the Amazon rain forest and its immense diversity of plant life have a very uncertain future. During a recent expedition in Brazil’s Amazonia National Park, I awoke to a cloud of fog hanging low over the San Luis rapids on the Tapajos River, one of the largest tributaries of the Amazon River.
The scene struck me as an apt metaphor, not only for the Tapajos region—the area in the photo is slated for a massive hydroelectric development that will flood portions of the national park—but also for the entire Amazon basin. My Brazilian collaborators and I hope that our race to inventory threatened plant diversity in the Tapajos region will yield information useful to local communities and governments as they struggle to strike a balance between much-needed economic development and conservation of irreplaceable plant species.
