New Collaborative Conservation Initiative for Haitian Palms A grant from the Prince Bernhard Nature Fund (based in the Netherlands) is supporting a conservation action plan for the most threatened palm from Haiti, Attalea crassispatha. Haiti’s Jardin Botanique des Cayes, Fairchild and Florida International University are developing the plan. The project is led by William Cinea, director of the Jardin Botanique des Cayes, in partnership with Fairchild Herbarium Curator Brett Jestrow and Dr. Javier Francisco-Ortega, a Florida International University/Fairchild faculty member. They hope to conduct field studies to determine current threats to A. crassispatha, collect seeds to establish stocks for sustainability exploitation and use molecular markers to determine current levels of genetic diversity. They also plan to develop an extensive outreach and educational program with local communities and farmers, and to expand ex situ conservation activities at the Jardin Botanique des Cayes. The project builds on previous conservation initiatives targeting threatened palms from Hispaniola; those involve botanists from the National Botanic Garden of the Dominican Republic. Jennifer Possley and James Lange grants support work of South Florida conservation team Fairchild’s South Florida Conservation team recently received several grants to carry out its work with the rare native plants of South Florida and the Caribbean. Funding from Miami-Dade County Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces will support rare plant mapping, monitoring and research in Miami-Dade preserves for the next five years. Funding from the Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services is supporting work with South Florida’s rarest species, and is providing partial funding to the Connect to Protect Network. The Conservation Team also received grants for projects focused on seed collection from the Center for Plant Conservation; recovery of federally endangered Puerto Rican endemic plants from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service; and post-fire vegetation monitoring in Everglades National Park from the National Park Service. L-R: Dr. Lisbet González, Dr. Ramona Ovied, a local field guide, Nichole Tiernan and Jonathan Flickinger, at Pico Mella in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountain range. Photo by Nichole Tiernan FIU-Fairchild Students Perform Research Field Work in Cuba Last August, Florida International University-Fairchild graduate students Jonathan Flickinger and Nichole Tiernan traveled to Cuba to collect plants for their doctoral research on the systematics of Caribbean Myrtaceae and Plumeria, respectively. During a two-week-long field trip, they collected in the mountains and along the coast of eastern Cuba, along with hosts Dr. Ramona Oviedo and Dr. Lisbet González, botanists at the Instituto de Ecología y Sistemática in Havana. The students also visited the Jardín Botánico Nacional and the Jardín Botánico de Las Tunas to study their living and herbarium collections. This work was supported by the Garden as well as the Tinker Foundation (through the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center of FIU), in addition to the International Center for Tropical Botany of FIU—which supported Tiernan and Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens—which supported Flickinger.
FairchildTropicalBotanicGardenDEMO
To see the actual publication please follow the link above