Organization: Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG)
Project Location: Madagascar
Web address: www.mobot.org
Title of Grant: “The Vahinala Project: A Catalogue of the Vascular Plants of Madagascar”
Grant Amount: $199,455 over 3 years
Principal Investigator: George E. Schatz
Organization Background:
Founded in 1859, the Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG) is one of the world’s leading scientific institutions promoting the study of plant diversity by exhibiting plants and gardens, educating people about them, and conducting research to expand and apply knowledge about the natural world. MBG’s mission, To discover and share knowledge about plants and their environment, in order to preserve and enrich life, encompasses the Garden’s many activities. Driven by the imperative of species and ecosystem extinctions, MBG’s research has increasingly adopted a conservation focus. MBG scientists conduct active and widespread botanical research and conservation, working in more than two dozen countries to discover and share information about plants and their habitats, train local scientists and conservationists, and help develop solutions to pressing environmental challenges.
Grant Description:
Madagascar is widely recognized as a biodiversity hotspot of exceptional global importance. However, its flora, with extraordinary levels of diversity and endemism, is incompletely described and documented, and new species continue to be discovered at an astonishing rate. This situation severely compromises the role that plant information can play in informing conservation planning and economic development initiatives, and in assessing their impact on human livelihoods. The Vahinala Project aims to address this problem by creating a comprehensive on-line authoritative resource on the Malagasy flora, highlighting what is known and identifying gaps in our knowledge. The project, involving partner institutions in the US, Madagascar and France, and operating with a high level of Malagasy participation, draws from the existing baseline taxonomic data on Malagasy plants, compiled by the Missouri Botanical Garden during the last 25 years, and evaluates the available natural history collections and relevant literature to present a modern, updated synthesis within a phylogenetic framework, delivered through a user-friendly interface. The involvement of a broad range of stakeholders will be assured by means of participatory workshops, specialist contributions by experts, and innovative feedback mechanisms.
The Problem:
The island nation of Madagascar harbors a remarkable flora and fauna, the products of over 100 million years of evolution in relative isolation, and is a globally recognized priority for biodiversity conversation. With six families of flowering plants known only from the island, and more than 90% of the ca. 14,000 species of plants likewise endemic, Madagascar possesses a flora unparalleled in its diversity and uniqueness. However, despite more than two centuries of botanical exploration, the inventory, description, and documentation of Malagasy plants are still very far from complete. A renaissance of taxonomic studies over the past two decades has revealed that the magnitude of species diversity and level of endemism of the plants of Madagascar have been grossly underestimated. In such a dynamic environment, the lack of a complete and current enumeration of the plants of Madagascar compromises any potential role that these fundamental organisms can and must play in directly informing the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity. Urgent decisions related to conservation planning and the current expansion of the protected areas network, economic development initiatives involving mining and forest exploitation, and their impacts on human livelihoods are critically dependent upon an authoritative and accessible synthesis of information on indigenous plant resources.
The Solution:
To address this need for reliable information on Malagasy plants, the Missouri Botanical Garden and partners have launched the Vahinala Project: A Catalogue of the Vascular Plants of Madagascar. The goal is to create a practical, up-to-date, on-line synthesis of the flora of Madagascar for a diverse group of users, including systematists working on Malagasy plants, ethnobotanists and natural products chemists, natural resource and protected areas managers, conservation scientists, and governmental agencies. Realization of the Catalogue is now possible only because baseline taxonomic data on all names ever applied to Malagasy plants have already been compiled over the past 25 years into MBG’s globally-relevant TROPICOS database. The Catalogue organizes those names within a modern phylogenetic hierarchical framework, resolving cases of synonymy, and attaching critical information for biodiversity policy and planning to the correct, accepted name. Thus, the Catalogue delivers an authoritative synthesis of the indigenous and naturalized plants of Madagascar, providing for each species a profile of its habit/life form, ecology, endemic status, and distribution within Madagascar by province, bioclimatic zone, vegetation type, elevation, and presence in protected areas, along with its rarity and conservation status. Also associated with these “Species Pages” are images of specimens, line drawings, and in situ photos of living plants in their habitats, all of which facilitate research, identification, and communication among the target users and stakeholders. Over the past two years, MBG has made significant progress towards the goal, developing and testing the methodology, assembling the core team, and creating the prototype framework for dissemination through the Web via eFloras. Approximately 2,300 Species Pages, or 16.5% of the estimated total flora, have been populated and are now accessible. However, heightened urgency demands that MBG accelerate the rate of production of Species Pages, and achieve completion of that portion of the total flora for which species circumscription are acceptable by 2010 to coincide with both Global Strategy for Plant Conservation and Millenium Development goals.
Global Impact:
The Madagascar Catalogue project constitutes an innovative approach to biodiversity synthesis in an under-explored environment. By carefully evaluating the taxonomic status of all published names, and placing them within a modern phylogenetic framework, the Catalogue will serve as a taxonomic index, and will provide the systematic community with a comprehensive survey of future taxonomic needs and opportunities, as well as an informed estimate of total plant species richness and endemism in Madagascar. As such, the Catalogue constitutes a contribution towards the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Global Strategy for Plants Conservation, which calls for a working list of the world’s flora. The authoritative treatment of the endemic portion of the Malagasy flora feeds directly into international biodiversity database initiatives including the Catalogue of Life and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Catalogue activities at the two national herbaria, and the completed Catalogue itself, will result in the enhanced capacity within Madagascar to identify indigenous plant resources and provide critical information for natural resource management. Training workshops to demonstrate the application of the Catalogue to biodiversity planning and policy decisions will target not only herbarium staff, but also university scientists and students, representatives from conservation organizations, and governmental officials. |
