Superstars of botany: Rare specimens_an article in 'Nature'

[Vijayasankar]

Dear all

I thought this article may be of interest to you: http://www.nature.com/news/superstars-of-botany-rare-specimens-1.10498

 

Regards 

 

Vijayasankar Raman
National Center for Natural Products Research
University of Mississippi

[Vijayasankar]

Thanks a lot Prashant ji, for sharing your experience with Dr. Wood.
I am pleased to know... Thanks so much...

 

Regards 

 

Vijayasankar Raman
National Center for Natural Products Research
University of Mississippi

On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 12:10 PM, Prashant Awale <pka...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Vijaysanakr ji for sharing this article. 

In the year 2008 i had been to Mizoram and came across some interesting Acanthaceae plants, some Strobilanthes sp. I had tough time in fixing Ids. Then i came to know about Mr John Wood who had studied Strobilanthes sp of Mizoram. I interacted with him (thru email only) and he was kind enough to respond. All my plants were identifed by him and he was happy to see the photographs of the living plant which he had collected and kept in his herbarium. 

Thanks Vijasankar ji once again for sharing his article..

Regards

Prashant

[ushadi Micromini]

Vijaya, Thanks for the link, very interesting reading...
I had thought big time plant hunters had disappeared from the earth with the fall of the colonial atrocities... but no!! it continues...
How do these people know that 70,000 plants still need to be found, catalogued and named etc in the tropics... who has counted, if they have not been explored, collected and named?

weird...
usha di

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Usha di
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[Mahadeswara]

Dear Vijayasankar,
 I read with interest  the article . Thanks for forwarding the link for the excellent article.
Regards,
M.Swamy

[Vijayasankar]

Thanks Usha di.
In response to your question: "How do these people know that 70,000 plants still need to be found..."
These estimations are extrapolations, as far as I know.
They analyze sample plots/regions and extrapolate the species diversity in similar vegetation types and finally up to country or region level.
If you study the diversity of sample plots, for e.g. in Western Ghats, of known size, then you can estimate the diversity in the entire W.Ghats by extrapolating the available data, even if you don't study the other areas of W.Ghats. Similar method for other different bioregions/vegetation types such as E.Ghats, Himalaya, NE India etc. Then you can estimate the diversity in India :)
The actuals may be less or more, as you know.
Gurcharan ji may be able to throw more light on this.

 

Regards 

 

Vijayasankar Raman
National Center for Natural Products Research
University of Mississippi

[ushadi Micromini]

Thank You Vijaya, for explaining ...

That sounds like morphometry in medical research ...

but how do they know what is not known? how do they arrive at the UN-known plants number...

Unless they plot something like... number of species known 100 years ago and number known 10, 20 years ago in any given region/plot and and deduce what was not known 100 years ago and 90 or 80 years ago and extrapolate what may be unknown at present or in the future,   and hence what was discovered in 100 or 80 or 90 years etc.... and then extrapolate it to what might still be discovered...
but that would be too simplistic a model... one would need to consider the diligence of the earlier surveys and extinctions and new introductions  of plants over the century etc...  etc... many other things that I think I am not even thinking about today...

I guess entire departments' worth of staff and computer modelling and old reliable data would be needed and new surveys...
phew!!!

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Usha di
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