New Book by Garden Scientists Identifies Role in Seed Dispersal
Scott A. Mori, Ph.D., Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany, specializes in the classification, ecology, and evolution of the Brazil nut family and is especially interested in plant/animal interactions in tropical forests, including the pollination and dispersal of seeds by bats, the subject of his new book recently released by NYBG Press. Scott co-authored Seed Dispersal by Bats in the Neotropics with Botanical Garden post-doctoral fellow Tatyana Lobova, Ph.D. (now an Assistant Professor of Biology at Old Dominion University and an Honorary Curator of the Institute of Systematic Botany of NYBG) and student Cullen Geiselman (doctoral candidate in the joint program of the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology of Columbia University and the Institute of Systematic Botany of NYBG).
This yellow-shouldered bat (Sturnira lilium) is carrying a fruit of Solanum rugosum (a member of the tomato family). The bat digests the pulp surrounding the seeds and passes the seeds unharmed through its digestive tract; thus, the bat receives an important source of food from the plant and, in return, provides a service to the plant by dispersing the seeds away from the mother plant. Photo: Merlin Tuttle, Bat Conservation International
One of my roles as a scientist at The New York Botanical Garden is to inform policy makers and the general public about the ways in which plants depend upon animals for their survival, because conservation programs that fail to take the co-evolutionary relationships between plants and animals into account are doomed to failure. That, in part, was the purpose for writing Seed Dispersal by Bats in the Neotropics, in which my co-authors and I demonstrate the vital role bats play in maintaining the diversity of plants in New World tropical forests.
Bats are especially important as pollinators of flowers and dispersers of seeds, and this has become increasingly apparent as more and more bat/plant studies are published. In the book we review the role bats play as seed dispersers for the first time since A.L. Gardner’s classic paper on the topic in 1977. We present a literature review of all plants known to be dispersed by bats and all species of bats known to disperse seeds. We also present a summary of our intensive field studies of bat seed dispersal in central French Guiana. Our sampling expeditions took us to disturbed rain forest habitats as well as to some of the most pristine rain forests in the world.
Doctoral candidate Cullen Geiselman carefully untangles a bat from a mist net used for capturing specimens for identification and study. Photo: Patrick Chatelet
For over five years, we reviewed the literature on Neotropical bat/plant interactions and carried out field trips to French Guiana. Our basic research technique was to capture bats in the same kind of mist nets normally used to catch birds (see photo), hold the bats in numbered cloth bags until they defecated, and then identify the seeds found in the bags by comparing them to seeds represented in herbarium collections. We would look at the specimens of plants we had collected on the same expeditions that we were netting bats (we netted bats at night and collected plants during the day) and would also use the descriptions and images of seeds we found in the reviewed literature to help us identify the seeds we found in the bats’ feces. Our book includes 32 color plates of seeds that we demonstrated to be dispersed by bats, and this will be useful to help other researchers identify fruits and seeds regardless of where in the Neotropics they are carrying out their studies.
Brian M. Boom, Ph.D., is Special Assistant to the President and Director of the Caribbean Biodiversity Program at the Garden.
I have been around The New York Botanical Garden and involved in its scientific enterprise in one way or another for nearly three decades. Until now there has never been a publication as comprehensive as the one released last month that provides an overview of how the Botanical Garden’s scientific mission is realized. Scientific Research at The New York Botanical Garden features beautiful full-color photographs of work conducted both in the field and laboratory with informative text about current projects and facilities. It can currently be downloaded online.
Following the Preface by the Chairmen of the Garden’s Botanical Science Committee, Edward P. Bass and George M. Milne, Jr., Ph.D., and Introduction by James S. Miller, Ph.D., Dean and Vice President for Science, the book is organized as Research Facilities and Collections; Research Programs and Projects; Faculty Research Profiles; Results Shared with the World; and Training, Science Education, and Collaboration, including lists of selected research grants and faculty publications.
One of the best ways to get to the heart of the Garden’s scientific activities is to browse through the research profiles of the 32 Ph.D. faculty members who comprise the core of the Garden’s scientific staff and who are assisted in their programs and projects by postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students. The team is further enhanced by Honorary Curators and Research Fellows and hundreds of additional local, national, and international collaborators.
Readers will learn about the state-of-the-art research and collections facilities located on a 23-acre science campus within the Garden’s 250-acre landmark grounds as well as in far-flung field locations around the world. Research results, many serving to inform plant conservation and sustainable development policies, are regularly disseminated through books and journals of The New York Botanical Garden Press and increasingly via electronic catalogs and publications available from our C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium.
For those who want to discover even more, consider attending special lectures and symposia offered by the Garden, signing up for a Continuing Education class, or participating in the ecotour Ten Days in Brazil (October 10–21, 2009). Readers inspired to support the Garden’s scientific activities by volunteering and/or making a donation can learn how by clicking here.
Douglas Daly, Ph.D., is Director of the Institute of Systematic Botany and B.A. Krukoff Curator of Amazonian Botany. He is the co-author, along with Beth Ellis, Leo Hickey, Kirk Johnson, John Mitchell, Peer Wilf, and Scott Wing, of the newly released Manual of Leaf Architecture, published by NYBG Press. In this blog entry, Doug describes the invaluable information the book provides.
Often we can distinguish two unrelated plants just from their leaves, even if the leaves are similar in size and shape, but how do we pinpoint those differences and put them into words? Similarly, foresters in the tropics need to be able to distinguish valuable timber trees from closely related tree species that may be endangered or have poor quality wood, but what characteristics can they use to detect those species? Other scientists who study the plants of the distant past need to be able not only to separate leaf fossils but also to quantify how many of the same species are found at a given site; how can they do that consistently?
Until now, plant classification and identification have relied heavily on flowers and fruits, but these structures are not present most of the year. Moreover, fossil leaves are almost never found together with reproductive parts. Leaves display a wealth of characteristics that can be diagnostic at the level of genus or even species, but there wasn’t a logically ranked system that defined, described, and illustrated these characteristics. My co-authors and I wrote the Manual of Leaf Architecture precisely to provide an exhaustive, comprehensively illustrated reference for thoroughly describing the leaves of flowering plants, especially their vein patterns.
In our reasearch and writing we were able to draw fundamental conclusions about the evolution, ecology, diversity, and management of ecosystems and plant resources, based on identifications and characterizations that in turn are based on leaves. This reference puts all that work on a more secure footing.
Editor’s note: Manual of Leaf Architecture is receiving rave reviews. Lawren Sack of UCLA considers it a major contribution that will “revolutionize the study of leaves” and says it is “analogous to the first manual on human anatomy.” Sir Peter Crane of the University of Chicago calls it “indispensable” for researchers.
Garden Researchers Try to Understand, Address Challenge
Karl Lauby, Vice President for Communications, interviewed Christine Padoch, Ph.D., Matthew Calbraith Perry Curator of Economic Botany, who works with her team in Amazonia to combat agricultural fires that now regularly devastate both forests and farms in the region.
What’s going on with fires in Amazonia?
Fire has been used in tropical agriculture for millennia. In the past, fires rarely escaped the fields where they were used to clear brush, control pests, and fertilize soils. Large fires escaping from burning fields and pastures have recently become common events, ravaging forests, farms, and settlements in much of Amazonia. Such destructive fires have become a major problem along the upper Ucayali River in the lowland Peruvian Amazon.
Why are today’s fires in the Amazon Basin different and so destructive?
Extensive clearing of humid forests for cultivation and pasture, especially along the eastern slope of the Andes, has increased the vulnerability of the region to escaped fires. A major drought in 2005 set in motion conflagrations that burned more than 300,000 hectares (about 741,000 acres) of forests in the neighboring Brazilian state of Acre, producing economic losses of more than $50 million in Acre alone. Although the 2005 drought was indeed an exceptional one, droughts of similar magnitude have occurred in the western Amazon in 1926, 1983, and 1998, with far lesser impacts on forests and people. An observer of the 2005 fires in Acre concluded they were “a disaster never previously experienced by modern societies in this part of Amazonia.”
What does your research involve?
The premise of the project is that fire results from an integration of social, ecological, and climatic changes that are occurring in the region. Controlling fire damage and anticipating future fire depend on understanding these changes and how they are linked. The project, funded by the Tinker Foundation, is exploring the increasing fire danger inherent in landscapes in transition, e.g., ones that combine small- and large-scale uses, traditional communities with plantations operated by urban-based companies. The work will produce insights that will have implications not only for much of Amazonia but also for developing regions around the tropics.
How is your research and the Botanical Garden’s work bringing about change?
Project results are helping policymakers, communities, and farmers avert even more fire catastrophes as global climate change affects the region. The project has developed activities specifically designed to inform policymakers, local scientists and technicians, students, and members of the area’s communities of the increased danger as well as of ways to use fire safely. Our methods include informal meetings, illustrated lectures, and training courses. We are working closely with the regional government in all our outreach programs.
Please help support the important botanical research, education, and programs that are integral to the mission of The New York Botanical Garden.
Robert Naczi, Ph.D., is Curator of North American Botany.
At this time of year, one can hardly miss the grand display of yellow flowers on the floodplain of the Bronx River. The show is especially spectacular from the vantage point of the Magnolia Way bridge at the northern end of the Garden. The view is beautiful, even breathtaking.
Alas, all things are not as they seem, and the golden flowers belie a menace. Yes, beautiful, but a menace nevertheless. The profusion of yellow blooms belongs to an invasive species, Ranunculus ficaria, the Lesser Celandine. Lesser Celandine is a species of buttercup (Ranunculaceae), and is not to be confused with Celandine, a member of the Poppy Family (Papaveraceae).
Nieve Shere is Information and Collections Manager for The New York Botanical Garden’s Institute of Economic Botany.
As the Information and Collections manager for the Institute of Economic Botany (IEB), I manage ethnobotanical data and collections, coordinate the work of volunteers, and curate the Teaching Herbarium of Economic Plants, a valuable tool for education and botanical science.
The Teaching Herbarium comprises specimens that have economic value—for instance, those that are used in a commercial industry such as food production—and that are preserved in a way that allow for hands-on study. In fact, the Teaching Herbarium is used to train students in botanical identification as well as in the development of the Botanical Garden’s educational curricula and scientific exhibitions.
The Herbarium’s first specimens, in the early 1980s, were collected by Garden scientists Michael Balick, Ph.D., and Hans Beck, Ph.D., shortly after the creation of the IEB; later collections included those by Garden scientist Scott Mori, Ph.D., and longtime volunteer Dick Rauh, Ph.D. The majority of the teaching specimens are from the Arts Resources for Teachers and Students (ARTs) project, the first project initiated by IEB to develop the Teaching Herbarium.
Through the ARTs project, middle and elementary school kids on the Lower East Side surveyed plants sold in the Chinese and Hispanic markets. The students collected vegetables such as bok choy, cabbage, and taro and pressed, dried, and mounted the specimens. The specimens documented the historic and commercial data specifically about the diversity of foods sold in New York City markets. These collections, along with the specimens collected by the above-mentioned scientists, were instrumental in the development of the early Economic Botany courses that Dr. Balick taught at Yale University and at Columbia University’s CERC program.
Over the years the collection has continued to grow into a rich repository of plants used commercially such as for food, construction, and medicine. It now houses more than 600 specimens made up of 200 species from 113 different families. Dedicated volunteers reorganize and repair damaged specimens and update the database, making the collection even more user-friendly. The IEB is fortunate to have had for more than 25 years the dedication of Dr. Rauh, who has carefully assisted in the curation of this collection with the help of volunteers Connie Papoulas, Margaret Comsky, Ermgaard Clinger, Gwen Dexter, and Daniel Kulakowski.
Specimens from Dr. Mori’s Brazilian teaching collection are currently on display in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory (pictured) as part of The Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern. Additional specimens from the Teaching Herbarium will be featured and new plant material provided for visitors to make their own specimens during the Herbarium Specimen-Making Workshops to be held in the Library building each day from April 9 to 19, beginning at 2 p.m.
If you would like to get involved with the Teaching Herbarium, please contact Volunteer Services at 718.817.8564 or volunteer@nybg.org.
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 and equipment like sets of the Tread Labs Stride Insole for our hiking boots 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.
Amanda Gordon is a freelance writer based in New York City.
The displays in The Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern include specimens of orchids and other plants from Brazil that are stored in the Botanical Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium. The fourth largest herbarium in the world and the largest in the Western Hemisphere, it contains more than 7 million specimens of plants and fungi.
So how does the Herbarium work, and how do scientists use it? To find out, I sat down with Dr. Barbara Thiers, Director of the Steere Herbarium and the C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium. A plant scientist specializing in liverworts, Barbara belongs to a botanical family: Her father was a botanist who ran a herbarium, and her husband, Dr. Roy Halling, is also a scientist at the Garden, focusing on mushrooms.
What is the history of herbariums?
The concept of the herbarium originated in 14th- or 15th-century Italy. Plants were collected because people figured out early on that plants could be useful in treating maladies. Reference collections were made so people would know what plant to use for what. At first the plants were kept in bundles. Then someone got the idea of pressing the plants and putting them in books. The plants are then mounted on paper. That’s how specimens are preserved to this day.
Where are the specimens stored?
It’s amazing the amount of design that goes into making a good herbarium cabinet. The specimens are kept in specially designed steel cases with good sealing gaskets that keep them flat and dry and dark and away from bugs. If they’re well maintained, they can last indefinitely.
How do scientists use the specimens in the Steere Herbarium?
There’s a lot of use by people who are documenting rare and endangered species. Others are using the data for ecological modeling so they can ask questions about how the vegetation will change and how fast temperatures will rise in order to identify areas that are endangered or that are critical habitats for animals. A user could be curious about particular groups of plants—for example, forest species that are used for timber.
We have a number of herbarium sheets that are the “first-known collections” of specimens, such as purple loosestrife and cheat grass. The sheets can help to date the invasion of a species and to understand how a plant may have moved across a country. Government agencies are also heavy users—for example, the folks at Kennedy Airport. When they confiscate plant material, they’re supposed to do the best job they can to identify the material.
Do these records become obsolete?
No. Just the opposite: The specimen in the herbarium is how you save it forever after. Even when you have a very high-resolution digital image, there are some things you can only examine by looking at the actual specimen. This is the best information on what plants grew where and when.
You’ve already digitized 1.7 million specimens since 1995. What are your objectives for online access?
We have to do our best to handle all the material and make it as available for scientific research as possible. Our goal is to digitize the whole Steere Herbarium and to constantly improve the way we do it. Electronically, we’ll take some big leaps in how we share our data online. Wherever possible, we are linking the information about the specimens to the research that’s been done here by our staff and to the library collections. We’re creating a portal to the research that’s been done here.
How much use does the Steere Herbarium get?
People who come here to look at the specimens total 1,200 days spent here each year. We also send out 40,000 to 50,000 specimens a year for people to borrow. We send and receive 350 specimens a day in our shipping office.
Can amateur botanists use the Steere Herbarium or the Starr Virtual Herbarium?
We don’t have a lot of content that interprets what we have for a general audience, but we have some evidence that general audiences use it. We get a lot of hits by state and educational Web sites. We have dried specimens, so someone has to be able to look at a dried plant and imagine what it looks like. To look up a specimen you have to know the scientific name.
Do you get a chance to enjoy the living collections at the Botanical Garden?
I really love the Rock Garden, and one of my favorite places is Azalea Way. I like them not because they’re beautiful to look at, which they are, but because I have a great fondness for the plants that grow in those spots.
Please help support the important botanical research, education, and programs that are integral to the mission of The New YorkBotanical Garden.
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.
Dr. Doug Daly examines the ant domatia (chambers) of a Tococa (Melastomataceae) in Acre, Brazil. Ants live and reproduce in the swollen leaf petioles, and in return they protect the plant from herbivores. Photo by Rogerio Reis/Black Star
“For me, the pure enjoyment of botany is in exploration, discovery, and especially solving puzzles,” says Dr. Douglas Daly, the B.A. Krukoff Curator of Amazonian Botany. A 30-year veteran of the Garden, he focuses on three avenues of research: flora and conservation of the Southwestern Amazon region, applications of plant taxonomy and systematics in ecology and public policy, and systematics of the Burseraceae, a diverse family of tropical trees and shrubs best known as a source of frankincense and myrrh.
Some of the mysteries he unravels help to conserve biodiversity in Brazil. For instance, his new book, Manual of Leaf Architecture, which he co-wrote with six other botanists, provides a detailed framework for describing leaves that is enabling loggers and conservationists to distinguish rare and endangered tree species in the field and the herbarium. At the same time, he has been the catalyst for bringing together the World Wildlife Fund-Brasil, the Forest Stewardship Council, the Tropical Forest Institute, the Brazilian Forest Service, and Amazonian state agencies to work together on overhauling the biodiversity aspects of the standards and procedures for managing certified forest operations as well as operations in national forests in Brazil.
His wide-ranging research in the southwestern Amazon, especially in Acre, Brazil, not only helps regional governments designate conservation areas, but it also produces vital information about useful plants that aids forest dwellers to better manage their resources for a more sustainable living from the forest. The book he published with his colleague Marcos Silveira in 2008, First Catalogue of the Flora of Acre, Brazil, is the first of its kind for any major part of the Brazilian Amazon.
A sample of his publications illustrates the scope of his work:
The local branch: Toward better management of production forests in Amazonia.
“Lost” plant collections from the Amazon 1. The 1899 expedition of Dr. Luigi Buscalioni. (w/ A. Miloza)
Cacao and its relatives in South America: An overview of taxonomy, ecology, biogeography, chemistry, and ethnobotany. (w/ N. Bletter)
A digital base map for studying the Neotropical flora. (w/ N. Bletter)
Floristic aspects of the Rio Juruá basin: Botanical history, peculiarities, similarities, and importance for conservation. (w/ M. Silveira)
Forests of the Rio Negro. (book edited w/ A. Oliveira)
Lowland vegetation of tropical South America—an overview. (w/ J. Mitchell)
The “black holes” of diversity—Studies in Acre reveal the precariousness of our knowledge of the Amazonian flora. (w/ M. Silveira)
The role of the physician in medicinal plant research. (w/ Dr. C. Limbach)
The National Cancer Institute Plant Collections Program: Update and implications for tropical forests.
“When you work with biodiversity, resource management, and conservation in Brazil, the scale is daunting and the stakes are very high,” says Doug. “But my Brazilian colleagues and the students we are training are so talented, dedicated, and resilient that I really believe we can make a difference in the future of the Amazon region.”
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.
At this time of year, one can hardly miss the grand display of yellow flowers on the floodplain of the Bronx River. The show is especially spectacular from the vantage point of the Magnolia Way bridge at the northern end of the Garden. The view is beautiful, even breathtaking.
The displays in The Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern include specimens of orchids and other plants from Brazil that are stored in the Botanical Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium. The fourth largest herbarium in the world and the largest in the Western Hemisphere, it contains more than 7 million specimens of plants and fungi.
Dr. Doug Daly examines the ant domatia (chambers) of a Tococa (Melastomataceae) in Acre, Brazil. Ants live and reproduce in the swollen leaf petioles, and in return they protect the plant from herbivores. Photo by Rogerio Reis/Black Star