SCIENTISTS working with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) have helped to discover new species of plants.
Working collaboratively with international partners, researchers discovered two previously unrecorded begonias and a rare species of ginger.
Over the last year, RBGE scientists have combined their work in the Herbarium and research glasshouses in Edinburgh with field research conducted in India, Papua New Guinea and Malaysia to better understand the needs of habitats in some of the Earth’s most vulnerable biodiversity spots.
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With a lack of understanding of the region’s diversity, some species are in danger of being lost before their potential benefits are fully understood.
Begonias
Dr Mark Hughes, RBGE’s taxonomy research leader worked online with Indian botanist Dipankar Borah from Goalpara University to make the most of Borah’s access to the rich and well-preserved forests of Arunachal Pradesh in North East India.
Despite the challenges of working remotely, the pair were able to use the best of their resources to describe the new species.
Hughes commented: “Assigning scientific names to species is at the core of biodiversity accounting.
“It is only once a species is named you can truly investigate what its place is within the environment and therefore how mankind can work to use it or protect it.”
Ginger
Meanwhile, in Papua New Guinea, RBGE’s ginger specialist Dr Axel Dalberg Poulsen and colleagues from the PNG Forest Research Institute used a traditional plant hunting approach to navigate crocodiles on the Oriomo River, torrential rains and tropical fevers in the hunt for the ginger species Alpinia fusiformis.
The team’s efforts proved fruitful with Poulsen (below) able to export seeds from the plants to allow further research, with the young plants now thriving at RBGE.
With the help of PhD student Rudolph Valentino Docot, originally from the Philippines, Poulsen was able to confirm the species was not in fact Alpina, as recorded for the first time in the 1960s.
Research remains ongoing to determine the true nature of the species and Poulsen will return to PNG this summer to continue the work.
Commenting, Poulsen said: “The ginger which we ‘re-found’ in PNG will not only inform our understanding and conservation efforts in and around the island, but we hope that the species can also go on to be a new star of the visitor experience when our glasshouses reopen to the public after the Edinburgh Biomes refurbishment.
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“The business of collecting plants and ‘plant hunting’ is a challenging and exciting one – often navigating dangerous terrain in the name of biodiversity research.
"But there is a very strong motivation driving the work. Every new discovery could have a significant material impact on global biodiversity loss, which is one of the biggest climate challenges facing the world today.
“With the support of funders such as PPL, and our international partners, these plants are now part of the greater objective in which we play a part.”
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