May 13, 2012 Arnold Arboretum

In order to improve access to the collections for the public and scientists alike, the Arboretum’s information technology staff are developing strategies to share our data through easy-to-use technologies. more »

May 13, 2012

Mobile Collection Researcher application

The Arnold Arboretum is pleased to announce the launch of two new mobile applications to facilitate explorations of the Arboretum’s plant collections. These releases are part a wider initiative to expand access to the Arboretum’s resources as a landscape for science, learning, and recreation.

All accessioned plants at the Arnold Arboretum are mapped, documented, and tracked by staff with the help of a collections database, BG-BASE. Until recently, availability of this data was restricted to complex software systems used by Arboretum curation staff, or locked away in paper files. Last fall’s launch of Collections Researcher represented a leap forward in sharing this information globally by linking Arboretum data with a powerful GIS (geographic information system) for desktop explorations of the Arboretum. This week, the Arboretum marks a further milestone in this effort with the release of test versions for two software applications that map the Arboretum’s accessioned plants on mobile devices.

Arnold Arboretum Navigator

These mobile applications are Arnold Arboretum Navigator and Mobile Collections Researcher, and are introduced for public testing as part of festivies celebrating Lilac Sunday on May 13. Arnold Arboretum Navigator allows users to locate plants in the collection and and is compatible with most smartphones currently available. Though limited in functionality at this time, future versions will deliver features consistent with those available in our second application, Mobile Collections Researcher. This second tool is optimized to function using the latest technology from Android manufacturers and Apple’s iOS platforms for iPhone and iPad. Mobile Collection Researcher enables you to search the collection, view seasonal plant highlights, and link to individual plants at the Arboretum.

Try one or both of these applications as you explore the Arnold Arboretum landscape with your mobile device. Please offer your feedback, which will be useful to staff in engineering new features and functionality for the Arboretum’s mobile applications.

The first collection made by our parataxonomist team in Seram, probably an Ericaceae

While no one doubts this role of experience, a recent paper by Bebber et al. (2012) reviewing numbers of type-specimens per collector suggests that long experience makes one disproportionately more successful at finding new species (type specimens are those plant collections associated with the descriptions of new species). The authors found that “more than half of all type specimens were collected by less than 2 per cent of collectors.” This group of ‘elite collectors’ has been vitally important to the discovery of plant diversity, but the number of people in this demographic (herbarium-employed, expatriate, general collectors) is dwindling. A new model must emerge if we are to continue, and indeed step up, plant species discovery before it is too late. In a related article in Nature, John Whitfield (2012) quotes John Wood, an active elite collector, as saying, “It’s possible that the days of the non-native plant collector are virtually at an end, and people like myself are the last examples.”

During my time working in Southeast Asia, I have been repeatedly struck by the enthusiasm of young local scientists and students for getting out in the field and collecting. Surely their energy can be harnessed for discovering plants in their countries? It should be a natural switch: from expat experts to more local ones. The question is: who and how? Local professional botanists are the obvious inheritors of the ‘elite’ crown, and it is likely that a sizable proportion of the ‘2%’ were not expats. In Indonesia today, elite collectors would include Mien Rifai, Ismail Rachman (Herbarium Bogoriense), and Kade Sidayasa (Wanariset, E Kal), and younger professionals on their way up including Ary Keim (Herbarium Bogoriense), Charlie Heatubun, and Krisma Lekitoo (both from Forest Research Center, Manokwari). But in a country the size of Indonesia, even experienced, well-traveled national botanists may not return to a place frequently enough to really come to know a flora—although a developed sense for where to look for new species in a new place will help them.

So I believe there’s a vital role for local, non-professionals who can be trained to be very effective ‘plant-spotters.’ With our current work in Borneo, Teguh Triono and I are working with two groups to build local capacity for plant discovery: university biology students and park rangers. The goal is to maximize the botanical capabilities of those with little experience using technology (Webb et al. 2010), while identifying and retaining those special few with ‘the eye for plants’ who desire to go further and become so-called ‘parataxonomists,’ or plant experts working outside normal academic channels (Basset et al. 2000, Pfeiffer and Uril 2003, Basset et al., 2004).

The stilt roots of a giant Pandanus tree. “How do we collect this one?” asked Iik (right) to Endro (left)

After three years, I am pleased to apply the term parataxonomists to our field assistants, Endro and Acun. Their collecting trip to Seram was a way to further develop their skills and confidence, and also to assess the effectiveness of the model of using parataxonomists for core collecting work. Their specimens are now back in Bogor and have been dried, and our herbarium team are starting to examine them. It will be tremendously exciting if we have one or two new species.

While on the trip, Endro and Acun spread the collecting methods they had learned. Endro writes:

“The first day we surveyed the river as we usually do in Borneo. It was great to see the enthusiasm of the team. We started with a demonstration of how to collect, and since the team was learning, we did not expect to make many collections on this first day. However, if we did a good job with the training, the whole trip should be more effective.

One funny thing was when Iik (Manusela park staff) asked, “How about collecting pandans?” I described my experience from Borneo, that normally we have no problem collecting them, even their stilt roots. Then Iik pointed to a pandan nearby, and I had to laugh: the plant was huge, with many stilt roots, each 20 cm in diameter, and a total height of more than 20 m!

We got ten specimens on this first day, from lianas, trees, and pandans, quite satisfactory. Several of the trees were quite tall, but the tree climbers rose to the challenge. And the training went well, with everyone happy with their different roles. We also talked about types of plants and how we can identify them.”

The training offered by Endro and Acun was so welcomed and successful that we have initiated discussions about developing a plant collecting program at the Manusela Park office. Imagine if we had experienced parataxonomists based at each national park in Indonesia, making high quality collections with DNA vouchers, taking photos, and uploading the data to networked databases. While individually none of them may ever collect as many type specimens as the elite global collectors of yesterday’s botany, as a group they may still be successful at finding many new, rare species, because locally they will be ‘elite parataxonomists.’

References

• Basset Y, Novotny V, Miller SE, and Pyle R. 2000. Quantifying biodiversity: experience with parataxonomists and digital photography in Papua New Guinea and Guyana. BioScience 50:899–908.
• Basset Y, Novotny V, Miller SE, Weiblen GD, Missa O, and Stewart AJA. 2004. Conservation and biological monitoring of tropical forests: the role of parataxonomists. Journal of Applied Ecology 41:163–174.
• Bebber DP, Carine MA, Davidse G, Harris DJ, Haston EM, Penn MG, Cafferty S, Wood JRI, Scotland RW. 2012. Big hitting collectors make massive and disproportionate contribution to the discovery of plant species. Proc. R. Soc. B, 279:2269-2274
• Pfeiffer J., Uril Y. 2003. The role of indigenous parataxonomists in botanical inventory: from Herbarium Amboinense to Herbarium Floresense. Telopea 10:61–72.
• Webb CO, Slik JWF, Triono T. 2010. Biodiversity inventory and informatics in Southeast Asia. Biodiversity and Conservation 19: 955-972.
• Whitfield J. 2012. Superstars of botany. Nature 484: 436-438.

April 27, 2012 Harvard Gazette

Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Elizabeth Crone lectured at the Arnold Arboretum on maple ecology as part of the Cambridge Science Festival. more »

The Seram team: Jumrin, Peros, Boy, Iik, Acun, Sony, and Endro

Soon after I posted the last blog, I got a call from our team member Endro. He was in high spirits, having just enjoyed a successful week in the forest. He had, however, come out early, both to escort one of the team members to a clinic for stomach ache and to address his own rather severe medical needs: he needed to have two teeth pulled out at the hospital. They had been causing him excruciating pain all week, since, he said, he had eaten the spicy fish dish mentioned in the last post. He noted that the Masohi dentist was much more gentle than the ones he had encountered at home in West Kalimantan! Given the pain he had been in all week, his enthusiasm for the trip was all the more impressive. Before heading back into the forest, he wrote:

“Finally our departure day arrived. Accompanied by two park staff (Jumrin Said and Iik Ikhwan) we left on our collecting trip, heading for ‘Camp Illie’ [a national park ranger campsite near a river, high in the central mountains of Seram], three hours away by bus.

Camp Illie

The road cut through the dense Seram forest, which is intact and protected to this day [sadly, something unknown in Kalimantan], and truly beautiful. The road switchbacked endlessly [on the face of precipitous slopes] with many shortcuts (to Heaven!) to left and right. Right by the road were small Peperomia plants, and behind them stood stately rows of Duabanga moluccana and (amazingly still standing) Terminalia trees.”

Duabanga moluccana is a common pioneer species throughout the wet forests of Indonesia, and a few species of Terminalia also reach west into Borneo. However, the greatest diversity of Terminalia, at least in Malesia, is east of Wallace’s line, primarily in New Guinea (see e.g., these species). Terminalia gives its name to a distinctive tree architecture model, terminalia-branching: a terminal shoot grows horizontally and then bends up to form a dense ‘rosette’ of closely spaced leaves at its tip. The next iteration of the branch then grows not from the tip, but from a few centimeters below the tip, and grows out horizontally before bending upwards and forming a leaf rosette. The outcome is flat sprays of leaves linked by inverse arches. One of my favorite trees, from the standpoint of beauty, is Terminalia mantaly, the Madagascar almond, a common street tree in Asia.

From climbing for parrots to climbing for specimens!

“Also on our expedition were three locals (Sony, Peros, and Boy) from the village of Masihulan, who sometimes worked as porters for any visitors to the park. They were also capable tree climbers who used to trap parrots, but who now helped conserve them.”

At the end of our Gunung Palung expedition I was concerned about finding tree climbers at other expedition sites. I needn’t have worried about Seram. Endro said the climbers here were even ‘crazier’ than the Melayu climbers in West Kalimantan (i.e., our trusty team members Edy and WX), shimmying out to the smallest branches, where they were in the habit of coating the twigs with glue to catch the amazing parrots of the island.

“Near the camp, we slid down paths made slippery in the recent rain. Droplets clung to the leaves and the moss that blanketed the trees in this forest. It was getting dark when we finally arrived, and we quickly threw up the tents and stored the supplies. Cups of hot chocolate finished off this first day in the forest; we were indescribably happy to be here. Tomorrow we plan to follow the river upstream. In our experience in Kalimantan, riverbanks have many fruiting trees.
Then, to the soft sound of Boy’s singing “from the tip of Halmahera to the far Southeast, we are all brothers” (a famous local song of reconciliation after the Maluku conflict), we drifted off to sleep.”

Endro told me over the phone that they went on to get many specimens (50 plants in the first five days), most of them trees. Herbaria always contain an over-representation of species that are herbs and small shrubs and a relative under-representation of trees; this is due to the fact that there are more specialists working on small plants and because they are obviously easier to collect. I have impressed upon the team how important it is to make the effort to collect the trees, and it looks like week one of this parataxonomist-led expedition has been a success.

The memorial to Georg Eberhard Rumphius, in Ambon

The expedition was planned for October and November 2011, and I took a quick reconnaissance trip in September. I was greatly assisted by Fransina Latumahina, an entomologist from the local Patimura University, who took several days away from her master’s studies in Yogyakarta to escort me to Ambon, the provincial capital. Fransina is writing up a dissertation on ant samples she collected in different habitats around Ambon: she had over 1,000 species to sort through, many of which will be new to science. While in Ambon, I was excited to locate the memorial to Georg Eberhard Rumphius in a high school courtyard; Rumphius was the first serious naturalist to work in Indonesia, producing the amazing plant book Herbarium Amboinense, covering over 1,200 species (just translated for the first time into English).

The reconnaissance went well, and I was warmly received by the Manusela Park staff, who seldom have researchers interested in the park, and even less frequently botanists; the parrots and cockatoos of Seram are its most popular natural attraction. I rented a car in Masohi to travel the well-paved but precipitous new road over the central mountains, and found what I hope will be a suitable lowland forest area on the north coast. The central mountains are primarily limestone and karst, and while often loaded with endemic species, this represents a different geology from that of the other expedition locations. However, the large northeastern plains of Seram occur over sandstone, and by trekking a couple days up the rivers into the foothills we should be able to find low rolling hills on sedimentary rock that will match our other expedition locations.

The beautiful rainbow bark of Eucalyptus deglupta in Seram’s lowland forest. This is the eucalypt that occurs farthest from Australia, even reaching the Philippines.

While taking the road on the way back through the mountains I was able to get cellphone reception, and was shocked to hear that my wife Kinari was seriously ill on a fundraising trip in Boston. I began perhaps the fastest trip ever made from Seram to Boston, arriving less than 48 hours later. Kinari pulled though, but I stayed in the US with her; we had to call off the full expedition planned for October, and have still not been able to reschedule the trip. Our project field botanists, Endro Setiawan and ‘Acun’ Hery Yanto, had been very excited about the trip, and have been disappointed at the ongoing delay. So I decided to capitalize on their eagerness and test the approach of ‘parataxonomist-led’ exploration that we have been discussing a lot recently (see, e.g., this paper). With the agreement of our main project collaborator, Dr. Teguh Triono, and with official permission already granted to our project, I sent them on a two-week plant collecting trip. They will hopefully visit two sites different from the one we plan to visit for the full expedition, and they are almost certain to come back with some very interesting finds. There has been very little serious plant collecting in Seram since expeditions by Dr Masahiro Kato and his team in from 1983-6 (see e.g. Kato, 1990), and on an Operation Raleigh expedition in 1987. The next few blog posts will document their trip, partly in their own words.

Endro sent this before leaving for the forest:

“We left from Jakarta on April 2 at 01:30 [on the night flight]. It seems like a dream: we will travel to a distant land where we never imagined we would be. That’s what made us unable to sleep on the plane!

Gandaria (orange, Bouea macrophylla) and rambutan (red, Nephelium lappaceum) for sale in Ambon. Photo: Endro Setiawan

At 7:30 we arrived in Ambon ['Ambon Manise'], a town famous since Dutch colonial times. By the side of the road, we saw gandaria fruits for sale [Bouea macrophylla], which gave us great expectations that there also will be fruit of other Anacardiaceae species in the forest. Ambon is a small but busy city, and we even got stuck in morning rush-hour traffic. We arrived at the lodge and immediately fell asleep, because we had not slept all night.

We spent two days in Ambon, and saw some of the city while we were coordinating with KSDA [regional conservation office] to get the specimen collection permit. Ambon is not so different from West Kalimantan, with an active ‘hanging-out coffee culture!’ The only difference is that they call the coffee houses here rumah kopi rather than warung kopi; the most famous is a place called the Lela Coffee House.

Ambon was peaceful [it has not always been], and at night Sam Ratulangi Street becomes a place for culinary tourism. We tried grilled fish with a typical sauce called colo-colo: chopped chilies and tomato in lemon juice. It was extraordinary!

Sunset in the Spice Islands, from Masohi. Photo: Endro Setiawan

On Wednesday afternoon we crossed the strait to Seram on the express ferry, a trip of two hours with magnificent views of blue ocean and high mountains. From the port of Amahai we went directly to Masohi, the capital of Maluku Tengah regency. Masohi is an old town, inaugurated by the Soekarno, Indonesia’s first President, and apparently the same age as Palangkaraya [in Central Kalimantan, once planned to be the capital of Indonesia]. But the conflicts made this a ghostly quiet city. Lots of roads and many large buildings, but deserted.

Over the Easter weekend while preparing to leave for the field, we amused ourselves fishing (both Endro and Acun are passionate fishermen), but fishing here is very different from Kalimantan. We have some learning to do!

After everything was ready [the hardest to find was old newspapers!], we left for the forest to collect plant specimens. In Masohi there are many fruits at this time: durian, gandaria, mangosteen, guava, mango, and langsat. We went with great anticipation that there would be much wild fruit in the forest. And we also hope to see the beautiful nuri Seram parrot, the kuskus [a marsupial], and swim with some morea [giant freshwater eels] in the river.”

I haven’t heard from the team since Monday. Hopefully all is well, and they have many amazing plants to tell about.

March 29, 2012 Harvard Gazette

Harvard researchers examine how fall seed set affects spring sap production. Explore maple ecology at a lecture on April 23 at Weld Hill. more »

March 21, 2012 New York Times

Peter Del Tredici, senior research scientist at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, discusses spring’s early arrival. more »

March 20, 2012 Landscape Urbanism

Senior Research Scientist Peter Del Tredici highlights the resilience of spontaneous plants to urban conditions and their importance in providing environmental services. more »

March 16, 2012 Arnold Arboretum

The Arnold Arboretum is pleased to announce that it has granted several research awards to support studies that utilize the institution’s collections of living plants, herbarium specimens, and extensive library and archival resources. more »