Plant collectors are endangered species

The days of the botanical adventurer, a relic of the western Age of Discovery, may be over:

The modern botanist tends to focus on one plant group and uses DNA sequences to decode evolutionary history and relationships. “We'll see fewer collections per individual because people are becoming so specialized. Just collecting a lot of specimens isn't something people have much respect for,” says Robbin Moran, who studies ferns at the New York Botanical Garden. The shifts in botany have had costs, he says. “The really big collectors have been tremendous generalists, and that's something that's being lost.”

This news feature in Nature discusses the work of some of the last botanical generalists - plant collectors who venture into the field to collect widely, rather than just particular groups that they specialize in. Why is their number dwindling? Among the reasons: fewer opportunities for botanical fieldwork, the increasing specialization of academic botany, and tighter controls on collection and export of plant specimens by countries which have the forests.

The lifestyle can be punishing. Among the explorers mentioned in the article are Alwyn Gentry of the Missouri Botanical Garden, who died in a plane crash in 1993, and Leonard Co of the Philippines, who was accidentally killed in a military operation while collecting in the field.

For science, the decline of general taxonomic knowledge is worrisome. Specialization is a natural consequence of the growth of knowledge, because as the amount of information grows, the proportion that one can master is correspondingly smaller. No one today would dare like Linnaeus to claim that he or she has constructed a complete System of Nature. But this doesn't mean that being able to name the plants and animals around one's home is irrelevant. As the article points out, one has to start early, when the mind is still impressionable and soaks up information readily. Humans are natural pattern-recognizers, and we have an innate urge to put names to things and classify them.

As a scientist I also value this sort of general knowledge. Science seeks to test hypotheses and answer questions, but these hypotheses and questions have to come from somewhere. In biology, the interesting questions tend to come from observing nature and pondering why something is the way it is: natural history in its most basic sense. Our world would be much poorer without it, and without the people who keep this knowledge alive.

Urban ecology: Revisiting weeds?

Urban landscapes seem very different from natural, 'pristine' landscapes, but many similar principles apply to understanding both of them. Those of us who are city-dwellers from birth, like most Singaporeans, have a very skewed vision of what urban vegetation 'should' be like, conditioned by heavily manicured and landscapes parks and plantings. We tend to look down on weeds and wildflowers as plant pests and ugly eyesores to be managed rather than celebrated. But weeds, or to use a more neutral term, 'spontaneous vegetation', have an important function in the urban environment, as Peter del Tredici argues.

Del Tredici is a scientist at the Arnold Arboretum and lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and has just written a book titled Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide, where he explains his philosophy of urban ecology in detail, along with descriptions of common species in the American Northeast. I attended a talk he gave in conjunction with a booksigning event, and was struck by how many of the things he observed about urban vegetation also applied to what we find in Singapore:

• Plants that thrive in urban open lots tend to be native to harsh environments. In the US, the 'Tree of Heaven' (Ailanthus altissima) is a cliff-dwelling species from East Asia and common in cities like Boston; in Singapore, Adinandra dumosa, which is common on wasteland, is actually native to limestone hills on the Peninsula.
  
• Bird-dispersed species with small seeds spread quickly and aggressively. Most of the successful species in urban landscapes are early successional species in 'nature'.
  
• The growth of spontaneous vegetation is inversely proportional to how wealthy the neighborhood is. In shrinking cities with declining economies, like Detroit, abandoned lots are being left to be grown over by wild grass and shrubs, and some companies even run pheasant hunts in the city because those birds are starting to colonize these spaces.
  
• Wayside trees planted for ornament and shade can escape and invade native habitats, displacing native species. Norway Maple is a big problem in Massachusetts, where it's illegal to plant this species, just like Albizzia might be in Singapore.
  

Ultimately what he argues for is a change of perspective - we can see these as ugly weeds, or we can incorporate them into our appreciation of the urban landscape, using and manipulating them to suit our needs. Even in their unmanaged form, urban wild plants provide many important services, not least among them shade and temperature regulation, soil consolidation, and even phytoremediation. With the economic downturn, less money is available for urban landscaping and planting, but if we can make use of these erstwhile invasive species, by weeding out the uglier and less cooperative species, making paths and borders, we could produce wild urban woodlands that enhance the urban experience, instead of detracting from it.

Looking at the plant list in his book, it is also striking how many of the species listed are actually common to both places. At the booksigning, he wrote in my copy that I "won't find any of these in Singapore," but at the genus or family level, there are quite a number of familiar names: Composites, Legumes, and Crucifers for sure, but also Euphorbiaceae, Scrophulariaceae, and Vitaceae. Familiar genera abounded especially among the grasses: Eragrostis, Digitaria, Poa. I'm sure someone has had similar thoughts before, but it would be instructive to look at the comparative community phylogenetics of weeds around the world - are certain groups of plants particularly predisposed to be successful in the urban landscape? If so we should start getting familiar with them, because these are the species that will be most familiar to most of the human population in time to come, if not already.

Cenchrus brownii

Cenchrus brownii - before I forget again and have to hunt the web for the scientific name!



Its quite common along the beach forest and it was first recorded in Singapore in 1950. I browsed the www and realised that the plant is in some flickr sets in Singapore without the name (I commented on them).. so here's the name so that the next time someone gets poked by it, at least can curse it properly.

Here's a nice picture of it courtesy of Ria from wildsingapore


It belongs to the grass family and not the sedge family.

Cenchrus brownii -!

As you can see, I am pretty invigorated by the fieldtrip I had this morning...

A rare nut

So, the other day we were at the East Coast Park beach playing with the sand when Josh picks up a "brain", well a hard fruit the size of a lime that look much like a brain. It took me a while before I did a double take and realised, my goodness, he had picked up a rare legume... a legume is the fruit of a member of the bean family.. That family of plants basically contains the peanut, soya beans, rain trees, in essence anything that has a pod, to be more accurate, a legume. the legume is a fruit that has 2 valves that will split along a line and reveal beans, which essentially are seeds. A pod is more layman and can be applied loosely to other fruits.

Anyway, what josh had picked up was a rare native of Singapore called Cynometra ramiflora L. var. ramiflora, its an inhabitant of back mangroves, which basically means, somewhere behind the mangroves where the ground isn't so muddy anymore and resembles an inland forest.

Why rare? When I revised the group for the Flora of Singapore, I listed it as "probably extinct", following a previous status accorded to it by other botanists. After a few years, someone else spotted it along one of the offshore islands and so it became extant in Singapore with at least one or two mature individual. So it was really great that a few more years later, Josh simply picked up the legume from the strand line along the east coast park beach.


Here's Josh presenting the rare legume. He had inadvertently picked it up and brought it to the at first unappreciative local authority on the Caesalpinioid legumes of Singapore.


This is Matt contemplating the size of the fruit. Its hard and corky so definitely buoyant. I am not sure where it came from though but at least it is here.

I looked around the strand line for more of the fruit and found another. How serendipitous.


Here's my botanical illustration of the species, from Loo, A.H.B. & H.T.W. Tan, 1997. The Angiosperm Flora of Singapore Part 6 --Caesalpiniaceae. Gardens' Bulletin, Singapore, 49: 55–106.