Kew Report: State Of The World's Plants & Fungi
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You mentioned South America, Eina, and you mentioned orchids from South America. We're going to speak to somebody now from Central America, from Honduras. His name is Johan Reyes Chavez. He's originally from Honduras and now based at University College Cork. And he's doing some very interesting research there. He's a PhD researcher. Hello, Johan. How are you? Thank you for inviting me. I'm great. How are you doing? We're delighted to have you. So tell us, first of all, about the orchids in Central America.
Oh, they're brilliant. They're lovely. We have from this really, really tiniest orchids to certainly like really big orchids. Like in my country, our national flower is an orchid, the Rincolelia digbiana, which has been unfortunately harvested illegally. But nowadays we are improving conservation on this beautiful orchid. And we just have really high diversity of them, over 600 different species.
Are a lot of them epiphytic? Are they growing on trees?
Yes, they are. And they are absolutely beautiful.
What are the unique characteristics of orchids in Central America?
And actually, some of the most interesting ones are so tiny, they're like your fingernail. That's how big they are. And they're also epiphytic, so they're really hard to find.
There are huge numbers of them worldwide. If I remember correctly, they're one of the plant groups that have the greatest number of species. And even here in Ireland, we think we have 30 here. We're doing really, really well with them here as well. And as Eoin said earlier on too, their numbers, they do appear to be increasing because people aren't mowing their lawns. So it's really a win-win situation for the orchids. Absolutely.
It's really interesting how changing our understanding on how to do conservation can actually improve on diversity and orchids have been benefiting from that. I've seen bee orchids and spotted orchids in just lowland meadows recently and they're beautiful.
Now, Johan, a new global report suggests that centuries-old plant collections could hold vital clues in tackling the biodiversity crisis. And University College Cork is playing a key role. You're the lead there, so tell us all about it.
Well, Cube Botanical Garden just published a new technical report called State of the World's Plants and Fungi. And the main topic is the digital biodiversity revolution, where herbarium, which are these libraries of collected specimens of plants, have been going digital. And now everyone can access them, see pictures of them. But most importantly, there's millions and millions of records. And the question is, what can we do with them? So in collaboration with other universities and other researchers and stakeholders in Honduras, we developed a chapter that got included into this technical report, which is how to safeguard nature with added data. So conservation managers normally have limited amount of data on the places that they are trying to conserve.
Let's say you have your back garden, but you don't really know what's growing on them. So through this digital revolution, we can actually see what's been collected there for hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And by doing this in protected areas, we're improving on the amount of information and plant diversity information that managers can use to conserve their natural spaces.
Yeah, herbaria are actually historical records, if you like. All over the centuries, people collected plants and lodged them safely in museums, botanic gardens, places like that. And the really important thing you had to have was where the plant was found. the date it was found. So you had to have the date and you had to have the place. If you put your own name on it as well, that was great because you'd know the different collectors. But it didn't really matter if you didn't know the name of this plant because the plant was there always as a record. You put down the plant name as well as you knew it. But because it was a historical record, it could always be looked at again and updated if necessary.
When I was doing my own research on see lavenders in Ireland in the 1970s.
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