Harvard botanists are cataloging thousands of plant species in a remote part of China and witnessing the effects of the country’s economic development.
Eric Bland
The popular image of the Tibetan landscape is of barren, high-altitude plains. But deep valleys cut through the 14,000-foot plateau, providing habitats for a surprising variety of plants and fungi in one of China’s biological hot spots.
Nearly every year for the last twenty-seven years, David Boufford of Harvard’s Herbaria and Arnold Arboretum has traveled to the Hengduan Mountain region of southwest China, which extends from the Tibetan plateau and is considered one of the country’s most remote and pristine areas. He and collaborators from Harvard and several Chinese and U.S. universities and institutions catalog and collect samples of the region’s thousands of plant and fungi species. China’s rapid development during those years has made it easier for the scientists to travel and collect samples, but it also threatens biodiversity and places greater importance on their work.
“The economic growth in China is so rapid,” says Susan Kelley, a fellow Harvard researcher who collaborates with Boufford. “We feel like we are racing against time to catalog the area.”
Harvard’s David Boufford inventories plants and fungi in the mountains of southwestern China. (Credit: Susan Kelley, Harvard)
Kelley, who recently returned from her seventh collecting season in China, says she expects that more than 12,000 vascular plants, 1,000 mosses, and 2,000 kinds of mushrooms will eventually be documented in a region the size of Texas that encompasses parts of three Chinese provinces and the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Those plant species represent one-third of all vascular plant species in China.
The large number of native plants and fungi are a function of the region’s extreme topography. Elevations in the Hengduan region range from between 6,500 feet to nearly 26,000. In one valley alone, mangoes and citrus fruits grow at the bottom, apples and peaches bloom on the slopes, while glaciers sit at the summit. The region is also the headwaters for five of the largest rivers in Asia—the Yangtze, Salween, Mekong, Irrawaddy, and Brahmaputra, which together provide water for one quarter of the world’s population.
One of the many plants documented and sampled by Harvard and Chinese botanists in southwest China: Pedicularis gyrorhyncha, from the Orobanchaceae or broomrape family. (Credit: Rick Ree, Field Museum of Natural History)
For each species of plant or fungus, Boufford and his colleagues collect samples and dry them in the evening for storage. They take photographs of the species and its surrounding habitat. They also preserve some samples in silica for later DNA analysis.
Easier going
Boufford first came to collect in China in 1980 as a member of the first botanical expedition during the Communist era. His goal then was the same as it is today: to inventory all the plant species in the area, taking careful note of their numbers and distributions.
“New roads and better facilities have made it easier to get around and process specimens,” says Boufford. Electric space heaters have largely replaced open-flame kerosene stoves. As recently as 1998, the collectors frequently went weeks without showers. Now nearly every town has full baths. Collection sites that once took days to reach are now hours away.
Boufford and colleagues have also witnessed the environmental effects of the country’s economic boom. For example, more yaks are being raised to provide meat for tourists. The animals eat away entire hillsides, increasing the risk of erosion. Some once-verdant hills show deep gashes from erosion.
The Kunming Institute of Botany hosts and works with the Harvard Herbaria group and hires local drivers for the collection crews. The researchers also partner with moss experts from the Beijing Institute of Botany. When in the most remote regions, the teams hire local villagers, usually Tibetans, as guides and cooks.
Watch out for yaks
Despite increased development and tourism, danger remains. In 1998 Boufford was charged by a mother yak when he got too close to her offspring. In 2000 he and Kelley were chased off a mountain by a blizzard. Fortunately, they found shelter with a female nomadic Tibetan herder and three men they suspected to be her husbands (the region is polyandrous).
“We were offered hot yak milk, and later cheese and tsampa [roasted barley flour], over an open fire,” recalled Boufford in an e-mail from Kunming, China.
Boufford carries on Harvard’s history of interest in East Asian botany. Asa Grey, a Harvard doctor who gave up medicine for botany, founded the Harvard Herbaria 150 years ago, authored the book Flora of North America, and even worked with Charles Darwin, first noted in the mid-1800s that many North American plant species had their closest relatives in eastern Asia. Joseph Rock, an Austrian-American who explored the Hengduan region in the early 1900s, sent his dried collections to the Herbaria, where they remain to this day, next to the latest samples from China.