Students Research Tropics in U.S.
By Betsy Taylor
ST. LOUIS – Hunched over her desk at the Missouri Botanical Garden, Cynthia Hong-Wa scrutinizes tropical plants found only in her homeland almost 9,600 miles away in Madagascar.
She collected 50 plant specimens from the African island, but it is here that she learns about them – in a program where she compares her samples to others drawn from roughly 6 million dried plants preserved in a herbarium in St. Louis.
Hong-Wa uses a digital caliper and sometimes peers through a microscope to measure leaves, flowers and fruits from her samples, as she works to define differences between the plant species she focuses on, shrubs and small trees known as Leptolaena. They’re not the prettiest plants around, but Hong-Wa says their beauty comes from their diversity.
Understanding the differences will help efforts to protect those that are endangered.
Scholars from more than 20 nations conduct research at the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center, which has an international reputation for its ecology and conservation research and educational programs. Based at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the center draws on resources at the botanical garden and the St. Louis Zoo, both among the top institutions of their kind.
“We’re from the tropics, but we come here to study the tropics,” said Hong-Wa. “We come here to have a better understanding of what’s going on there.”
The tropical ecology center, tied to the university’s biology department, has 50 Ph.D. students and 80 in the master’s program. Linking the garden and zoo to the university allowed the program to provide resources that many others did not have.
Students can use the botanical garden’s herbarium, which looks something like the stacks in a library but smells faintly like a spice rack.
Peter Stevens, the Whitney center’s director, turns a knob to open up an aisle between two rows of shelves, and the lights kick on overhead. On the shelves are pages upon pages of mounted plant specimens from all over the world, with information including their names, who identified them and the geographic coordinates for where they were collected.
The specimens, their pollen and seedlings can be studied. Researchers can determine how a plant’s anatomy changed over time, what the whole plant looks like and where it grows.
The herbarium’s plant stock comes from botanists who send in specimens stuck on acid-free paper and often wrapped in foreign- language newspapers to protect them during their travels.
Students draw from the latest scientific literature as well as from rare books, like a 1735 copy of Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae, a Latin text that classifies organisms in a system that became the international standard.
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