The Arbornaut, page 30
Dark Red Meranti
(Shorea curtisii)
HOW MANY PEOPLE THROUGHOUT THE PLANET can recite the names of the world’s most economically important trees, also one of our highest carbon-storing plant families? They are Dipterocarpaceae, a family with sixteen genera and approximately 695 species distributed predominantly in lowland tropical Southeast Asia. Their common name is dipterocarp, not part of the vocabulary of most people. The largest genus is Shorea (196 species), with other genera including Hopea (104 species), Dipterocarpus (70 species), and Vatica (65 species). The word Dipterocarpus originated from Greek: di means “two,” pteron means “wing,” and karpos means “fruit” (their fruits consisting of a hard, oily seed with one or two “wings”). The smooth, straight trunks reach nearly 300 feet tall, often without side branches for over 100 feet. The tallest known specimen is Shorea faguetiana, at 305 feet tall. Borneo is considered the epicenter for dipterocarps, representing 22 percent of all trees of some 270 species, including 155 endemics. Dipterocarps comprise the majority of biomass not only in Borneo, but also in Java, Sumatra, Malaysia, and wetter parts of the Philippines.
Dipterocarps are highly sought for their fine, straight timber used for plywood, furniture, flooring, boatbuilding, instruments, aromatic oils, and resins. One dominant canopy tree at our Penang Hill BioBlitz site was Shorea curtisii, commonly called dark red meranti. Our climbing team rigged one magnificent specimen tree for collecting as well as to train the local park guides for future arbornaut activities. S. curtisii is still selectively logged in Malaysia and Indonesia, though harvesting is restricted to large individuals with adequate numbers of conspecifics in the surrounding hectare. However, such legal requirements are not always accurately followed by loggers, nor is there much data on the inevitable decline of this species from harvesting. When left intact, dark red meranti provides critical habitat for many endangered wildlife: Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), Sumatran rhinoceroses (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis harrissoni), Borneo pygmy elephants (Elephas maximus borneensis), proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus), Borneo black-banded squirrels (Callosciurus orestes), leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis), and others.
S. curtisii is native to Malaysia, Indonesia, Borneo, Singapore, and Thailand, and one of the most common trees in these regions. As an emergent rising over two hundred feet in height, it has either gray or reddish-brown bark with coarse fissures. The leaves of S. curtisii are hairless, smooth, elliptical in shape, and approximately four inches long. Its small flowers are usually white or pale yellow, with five petals and fifteen stamens, although large enough for tiny insects called thrips to pollinate. Many dipterocarp flowers are highly scented to attract pollinators, either thrips or sometimes beetles. Fruits are winged, with three large and two short wings that turn red before ripening and eventually helicopter to the forest floor to germinate. Seedlings often germinate near adults because their winged seeds can’t float far from the parent. As mast seeders, flowering occurs only once or twice every decade, and sometimes longer. Such infrequent fruiting is a temporal escape strategy because the rapid pulse of seed production makes it impossible for frugivores to build up enough population to consume the entire crop over such a rapid time frame. In Borneo, the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) triggers the flowering and fruiting events, so future climate disruptions could negatively impact regeneration. Like other dipterocarps, Shorea species have unique underground fungal relationships, whereby their root hairs are intertwined with ectomycorrhizae that confer a competitive ability to absorb more water and nutrients than trees without a fungal partner. In the tropics, where competition for both soil resources and canopy space is critical, having fungal associates called mycorrhizae is a real advantage.
In addition to the exciting underground world of dipterocarps, another wonderful Shorea story took place in the crowns, and involved the discovery of their pollinators. According to the story, two Sri Lankan graduate students erected ladders into a tall dipterocarp and established a treetop base camp to patiently figure out what pollinated these mast seeders. One night it finally happened, and as with all mast seeding, it happened all at once. Tiny thrips, about a millimeter (0.04 inch) long with tiny nondescript bodies and small fringed wings, descended by the millions, pollinating Shorea crowns in rapid succession. Both graduate students climbed down and soon after became engaged, a true romance in the annals of arbornauts! Since this momentous event, a few other pollinators such as bees, beetles, and moths have occasionally been observed, but thrips are critical for the reproduction of this economic and ecological keystone species. Not too much else is known about Shorea canopies due to their inaccessibility. Their leaves deter herbivores due to bitter-tasting tannins, and even the leaf-eating colugo will not take a bite. The fact that one handsome Shorea curtisii is now permanently rigged as an iconic climbing tree at the Habitat eco-park on Penang Hill will undoubtedly lead to more discoveries of its arboreal secrets.
10
BUILDING TRUST BETWEEN PRIESTS AND ARBORNAUTS
Saving the Forests of Ethiopia, One Church at a Time
SPARKS FLEW FROM THE JERRY-RIGGED GENERATOR chugging along as best it could, flashing Google Earth images of Ethiopia’s remaining forest fragments, tiny green dots surrounded by huge expanses of brown subsistence agriculture. Dressed in khaki field clothes, I was an anomaly among an audience of over one hundred Ethiopian priests with flowing white robes and turbans. We had all come together with a common mission: to save the last native trees of northern Ethiopia. I had flown to Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, specifically to speak with the Orthodox Church leadership in the northern half of the country, where the only remaining native forests surrounded the church buildings; they were called church forests. These tiny fragments represented the last bastion for not only native trees, but also birds, insects, and mammals. Without these forest patches, the people’s livelihoods without pollinators or fresh water would be tenuous, and their biodiversity would likely become extinct. The priests were curious, and I could only imagine their quiet discussions—why would a lone female, not a practicing Ethiopian Orthodox churchgoer, and a white person at that, make such an arduous trip to discuss their local forests? My job was to explain why these small fragments of trees were not only important to Ethiopia, but unique to the world. By now I was an experienced arbornaut, re-prioritizing my career to use my knowledge of trees to save unique species, forests, and their biodiversity. Ethiopia was a huge challenge given the extreme poverty throughout most of the country, which in turn has led to an overall lack of investment in science or conservation. But her trees and insects, given their endemic status and their essential function for the African ecosystems, are every bit as important to planetary health as those in California or Peru.
The Ethiopian Orthodox churches (technically called Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, or EOTC) are surrounded by sacred groves; these are original (or primary) forests over a thousand years old. The churches dedicate their religious mission to protecting all of God’s creatures, as well as the human spirit. These forests were roosting grounds for endemic birds like the hamerkops, several species of hornbills, and sunbirds—as well as a treasure trove of over 168 species of trees, which were documented in an Ethiopian student’s PhD thesis dated 2007. As a conservation scientist, my mission is the same, but simply uses different vocabulary: to protect biological diversity.
My old laptop sputtered with the frequent electric surges, but it held up. When the priests saw aerial images of their own forests, surrounded by brown dirt and dry croplands, they gasped. They had no access to computers, Google Earth images, or even a biology book to help them learn about island biogeography, which is an ecological concept applicable to forest fragments. Depicting these images in my talk helped me convey the urgent need to forge a partnership between religion and science, to conserve these green treasures. Ethiopia was one of the most extreme examples of deforestation I’d ever seen.
Imagine approximately thirty-five thousand small stands of several hundred to many thousands of trees amid a barren landscape of subsistence agriculture. These green patches ranged from five to six hundred acres in size, and the number itself was highly debated because no one knows how to define a fragment—is it ten trees? Or ten acres? Some estimates placed the number of northern Ethiopia’s forest fragments at fifty-five thousand and others as low as twenty-one thousand. But we do know that less than 3 percent of the original 42 percent forest cover remains. This translates to under a million hectares (just over two million acres) of green dots surrounded by twenty-five million hectares (about fifty-five million acres) of subsistence agriculture. The tree stands are called church forests, and for thousands of years, local communities believed their house of worship should be surrounded by forests to provide refuge for all creatures. However, if your children are hungry or drought lowers your crop yield, it is understandably tempting to utilize this resource for survival. The locals occasionally prune trees around the perimeter for firewood, allow their cattle to graze on seedlings and understory foliage, overplant coffee crops in the understory, ring-bark older trunks to fell for additional timber, and sometimes use slingshots to secretly hunt mammals and birds when the family is desperately hungry. The priests lamented the degradation of their sacred forests, but without major economic or government influence, their only recourse was to pray for a solution; they had no influential budget, nor did they have the savvy to navigate politics. Due to their monastic lifestyle, many were not aware that the surrounding valleys had been clear-cut until they saw my aerial images in the presentation. These photos stirred the religious leaders into action, launching our unique partnership at several levels: science plus religion, one female working with hundreds of male priests, an American Christian among thousands of Ethiopian Orthodox villagers, and the integration of highly developed aerial technology with one of the world’s oldest spiritual philosophies.
How did I discover this urgent situation in Ethiopia? In my seventeenth year as treasurer of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC), our international meeting was held in Morelia, Mexico. I award a small check to the prize-winning student paper at every conference, and that year it went to Dr. Alemayehu Wassie Eshete, a recent PhD graduate whose thesis included a survey of native trees throughout northern Ethiopia in conjunction with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) endangered species list. This IUCN Red List earmarked species whose declining populations required urgent action. After handing him a check, I offered congratulations and politely asked, “What’s next?” He nearly burst into tears, explaining he was the only person working on this urgent issue. How could I walk away saying “Good luck” and not offer mentoring or collaboration? After all, I had almost thirty years of canopy research under my belt and had devoted the last two decades to forest conservation in three other continents. Why not apply those years of experience to Ethiopia? During past fieldwork in the Amazon and India, despite my expanding CV, I had not directly prioritized saving trees, which caused me to rethink my actions in mid-career. I had taken personal action, twice leaving the comfort zone of academic tenure to join a museum in an effort to reach diverse audiences through a public platform. I also wrote some popular natural history books, pursued a lively calendar of talks ranging from middle schools to college commencements, and pioneered virtual expeditions for middle school students. These experiences served me well as I increasingly focused on forest conservation, not just academic output.
My new Ethiopian colleague, Alemayehu, had a nonconventional background, in the worlds of both religion and science. As a child, he studied to become an Orthodox priest, serving as a child disciple to a senior priest as well as spending long periods of solitude in the forest. After a decade of religious training, he observed the disappearance of the ecosystem immediately surrounding the church, which he had come to love. His parents convinced him that an advanced education would give him expertise in both religion and ecology. He recognized that his conservation goal was not achievable from the altar but needed a combination of religion and science, so Alemayehu pursued and obtained a scholarship to Wageningen University in the Netherlands to study forest ecology. There, he dedicated himself to this research effort, alone in a foreign country far away from his wife and children. He brought the same determination to our collective efforts for conservation. Alemayehu and I reinforced each other with an inspiration: What about tackling one of the world’s most urgent forest challenges, saving the last forest fragments in Ethiopia called church forests?
Australia has a much higher level of scientific investment compared to many African countries. Could efforts to engage environmental stewards succeed in countries with fewer resources? And could conservation succeed with religious partners instead of academic or regulatory agencies? In Ethiopia, Alemayehu had little access to technology, fundraising, or sustainable solutions. That made it tough for him to convince local communities how important native forests are to human health. But he had earned the trust of local priests. For my part, I had access to technology, fundraising, and the latest scientific findings about ecology. We spent many hours of coffee-drinking in Mexico discussing the logistics of how the two of us could avert Ethiopia’s rapid landscape degradation. Drinking a final cup of coffee, we pledged to work together to reverse the losses of native forest in Ethiopia using the very disparate assets of religion and science. Forests are spiritually critical to several billion people worldwide; this may prove a key driver in the future of global conservation. It is relatively easy to translate timber, water, or pollinators into dollar values to calculate the benefits of trees to humankind, but tougher to estimate the worth of spirituality. Maybe the number of prayers should be considered an important metric, ultimately giving more standing to the notion of retaining forests instead of harvesting them?
For his PhD thesis, Alemayehu measured the growth and distribution of 168 tree species in 28 local church forests, earmarking those classified by international conventions as having endangered status. He observed their declining health due to human activities, especially the excessive grazing by livestock that invaded to eat juicy seedlings and understory foliage. He had learned how to calculate stand density and seedling decline in small plots, but he had no direct solutions for the priests to reverse the situation. Most families struggled to put food on the table and were not focused on the insidious degradation of native plants. And none of the priests had the scientific training to measure perimeter shrinkage or overgrazing of their church forests; they had only their observations that the integrity of their trees was increasingly compromised. After Alemayehu obtained his graduate degree in 2007, the priests started criticizing him about his research, because they realized his simply listing species and writing reports were not actions that directly saved trees in their sacred sanctuaries. They were right. He had identified the forest decline but had no positive actions to avert the situation. Even more discouraging in his eyes was that local women, ideally suited as community environmental stewards because of their daily chores, were not part of any solutions. Girls often left school after fifth grade and had their first child at age thirteen, but they had no voice as local stewards of their environment, despite their interactions with nature to fetch water, collect firewood, and grow gardens. Alemayehu was despondent over the fate of his country’s shrinking forest fragments, frustrated by the societal inclination to exclude women’s knowledge from environmental solutions, and dismayed to find no government support and not even a local NGO partner.
As a first step to acting on my pledge in Mexico, I bought Alemayehu a plane ticket so he could participate as a visiting researcher in the environmental studies program at New College, Florida. Our family was thrilled to house him during his stay. One night, while surfing the web on our family computer at 2:00 a.m., he discovered Google Earth. I awoke to hear the printer chugging away and Alemayehu mesmerized by aerial images to share with the priests. They depicted jagged perimeters where farmers’ plows had made intrusions into the church property, gaps in the canopy where the red stinkwood trees had been illicitly cut, and excessive walking trails crisscrossing the landscape. Google Earth confirmed Alemayehu’s ground-truthing observations: northern Ethiopia’s remaining native stands were in serious jeopardy. Because few priests ever left their small green enclaves, they did not recognize the severity of the degradation throughout adjacent valleys. And similarly, their local parishioners did not travel far afield to understand the broader context of Ethiopia’s deforestation.
After Alemayehu’s visit to Florida in 2008, I spent the rest of the year learning about African plant conservation from the existing (limited) literature. I read and reread Alemayehu’s thesis, plus a small handful of other publications, many of which focused on forest restoration using non-native species. The introduction of Australian eucalypts by the Ethiopian government dominated most reports. Almost like snake oil solutions, gum trees were touted as a possible canopy restoration for Africa. But they represented an insidious threat to the native canopy for three important reasons: (1) although non-native gums grew faster outside of Australia in the absence of their natural pests, their timber was not only inferior to the local species, but also a fire hazard due to their fire-prone chemistry; (2) their canopies excluded native biodiversity due to volatile eucalypt oils; and (3) they required about four times more water than native Ethiopian trees, sucking down the water table to dangerously low levels. We needed two quick actions: exclude the livestock from the church forests to save the seedlings and understory foliage, and eliminate the invasion of non-native eucalypts. We determined that an effective solution was to build conservation walls to protect the groves. Initially, I thought back to the success of barbed wire used for our tree planting programs on the Australian rural landscape. Maybe simple barbed-wire fences could protect the church forests? I tried to convince a large agricultural corporation to donate enormous spools of barbed wire for temporary fencing. No luck!
