Skip to main content
 
Science Talk Archive

Exploring the science of plants, from the field to the lab

A New Species of Tropical Tree with “Roots” in the History of International Commerce

Posted in New Plant Discoveries on October 21, 2013 by Benjamin Torke

Benjamin M. Torke 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 rainforest tree species.

Arthur C. V. Schott
Arthur Carl Victor Schott

As an avid history buff, I get excited when my research on neotropical legumes turns up unexpected historical connections. In one recent example, the discovery of a new species of tree shed light on a mostly forgotten episode in the 19th-century international struggle to control shipping commerce.

From 1857 to 1860, Arthur Carl Victor Schott—a topographical engineer, cartographer, naturalist, and artist—was part of a U.S. Army-sponsored expedition to survey a route for a transoceanic canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, one that passed through nearly impenetrable tropical rainforests in the Darien region of northwestern Colombia. The expedition was destined to become a historical footnote—an alternative route through what is now Panama was ultimately chosen for the now-famous canal—but a small collection of dried plant specimens that Schott gathered during the expedition have ongoing importance.

Virtual Herbarium Image
Schott’s specimen of a new species of tropical tree

Originally housed at Columbia College, the collection was brought to The New York Botanical Garden shortly after its founding in 1891. Over 120 years later, I recognized that one of Schott’s specimens, misidentified and misfiled decades previously, represented a new species. Although subsequent collectors have gathered additional material, I plan to name the species “Swartzia schottii” in honor of the intrepid explorer who first collected it. I hope that its belated discovery will help focus attention on the importance of conserving its habitat—a few scattered forest fragments, all that remains of the “vast jungles” that Schott encountered in the Colombian Darien.

Arthur C. V. Schott photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Specimen photograph copyright NYBG.