Tuesday, Oct. 26

There are six botanists on this expedition, but two of them are a continent away. Robin Foster and Corine Vriesendorp of the Field Museum, who have done dozens of these rapid inventories and who are taking a well-deserved break this time around, are going to join us at the end of the trip in Iquitos, where they’ll help identify the photos and specimens we’ve collected.

Robin is widely regarded as the best tropical botanist in the world, and he’s been doing rapid inventories since the very first one in the early ’90s. Corine is a plant ecologist who has been running the Field Museum’s rapid inventory program for the last seven years. Together, the two of them have also been trying to ensure that the museum’s plant and animal collections — historically reserved for specialists — are more widely available, and in a form that’s useful for conservation. The photo field guides that Doug mentioned in an earlier post are one example, and you can see the 287 different guides they’ve made, and helped other biologists make, by clicking here. Corine’s exuberant exclamations (“Niiiice!”) and Robin’s wry stories are missed by everyone in camp.

What we’re trying to do on this trip, in a broad sense, is to gauge these forests’ value for conservation and for the people who use them on a daily basis. We’d like to know how similar or different they are from other sites in the tropics, how diverse they are and what kind of shape they’re in. In the field, this requires that we do four different things: keep a running list of all the species we see; collect anything that has fruits or flowers (and press it, label it and preserve it in alcohol for the trip to the Iquitos herbarium); work out what the major forest types are; and do some quantitative surveys to figure out what the common plants are there. In a place where regional plant diversity probably exceeds 4,000 species, and where most of the diversity is up in the canopy, it’s clear that in four days of work we’re going to come away with a sketch, not a masterpiece. But it’s an informative sketch.You might think that Robin and Corine chose the other botanists for this trip by flipping through their Rolodexes and stopping at the most interesting names: Nigel, Zaleth, Isau and Roosevelt. Zaleth Cordero is a Colombian botanist who has worked all across that country’s Amazon, and who is especially good with the melastomes, a plant family that makes most other botanists cross-eyed. Isau Huamantupa is a botanist from Cusco who has studied plants all over Peru and Ecuador. He’s a hugely talented collector — the kind of guy who can fill his sack with flowering plants when the rest of us aren’t seeing a thing. Roosevelt García grew up in the department of Loreto, which is where we’re working, and among other things he’s a world expert on Iquitos’s famous white-sand forests. I haven’t worked with plants in northern Peru for several years, so my role on the team is that of the veteran bank robber who’s called up for one more job but who has forgotten the tricks of the trade and ends up triggering all the alarms — or, as the case may be, setting the laboratory on fire. The four of us are all under 40, but by putting our heads together and working long hours we can manage an approximation of what Robin does alone.

Yesterday, after pitching our tents at our third (and last) campsite, the four of us headed out to spend a couple of hours collecting along a tributary of the Rio Yaguas. What made the afternoon memorable was that the river we were collecting along — a river that measures a long stone’s throw across, from one bank to the other — was almost entirely empty. We’d seen it earlier in the day, flying in to camp, after kilometers and kilometers of Amazon green: long channels of cracked, whitish mud that looked like something from the Aral Sea. Now we could walk, Moses-like, down to the bottom of the river and up the other side. The channel is reticulate, so that once we started wandering around on its bed we discovered we were in a sunken maze of miniature forested islands.

The flora seemed like a classic blackwater assemblage, dominated by a suite of well-known species whose seedlings can survive long periods underwater. There was a lot of other interesting stuff out there, though — half a dozen different flowering bromeliads, a melastome shrub with bizarre, yellow-and-green-splotched leaves, fruiting vines festooning the trees hanging over the riverbed — and for those two hours we were in our element. We fanned out through the maze of islands, clambering up lianas to reach high epiphytes, clipping high branches with the poles, and hooting back and forth to find each other whenever we got lost. By the end of the afternoon we had more than 40 different species, and we retraced our steps back to camp to press them.

Source: http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/a-botanical-sketch-in-progress/