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A team of botanists from the US has named a new bush tomato species, based on collections made by their Australian colleagues, during government-funded surveys in a brand new national park.

After looking at collections from biodiversity surveys of a 10,000 km2 area now known as Limmen National Park, Bucknell University biology professor, Chris Martine, decided to form an expedition to relocate and describe a mysterious bush tomato uncovered during the government-sponsored studies.

A year later, Martine and his co-authors, including an undergraduate student, have published the new species in the open access journal PhytoKeys. The discovery offers a powerful case for investing in conservation through park systems at a time when these systems are under threat.

For the team of US scientists, knowing where to go was one challenge, but understanding the landscape in such a remote corner of the Australian Northern Territory and figuring out how to get there was quite another. Martine and his team from Bucknell (undergraduate lead author Mae Lacey and postdoctoral fellow Jason T. Cantley) could not do it without the local assistance and expertise of Peter Jobson, Senior Botanist at the Northern Territory Herbarium in Alice Springs.

To acknowledge the pivotal role of Jobson in the successful search, the new species, Solanum jobsonii, has been named after him.

“Jobson is one of a handful of botanists employed by the Northern Territory government who are tasked with stewarding a vastly diverse flora,” explains Martine. “Not only are many species there of conservation concern, but unknown numbers of species are yet to be found and given names. Those scientists are doing yeoman’s work.”

Martine named a previously discovered species for Ian Cowie, the Curator at the Northern Territory Herbarium in Palmerston, in 2011. Solanum cowiei, a species from Litchfield National Park, was described in a paper appearing also in PhytoKeys.

The scientists hope that the discovery of this latest new species turns a spotlight on the importance of protecting natural areas and supporting the individuals who are charged with their care.

“Notably, the use of trained biodiversity scientists in surveys of the proposed parkland provided masses of data in support of protecting this area as a national treasure,” write the authors in the article. “The discovery of the new species described here, and the potential description of other new forms of biodiversity from Limmen National Park, is a testament to the benefits of not only investing in national parks in Australia and elsewhere, but also investing in parks-based scientific inquiry.”

The new species, a relative of the cultivated eggplant, has been recorded under specific habitat conditions from only four locations in the monsoon tropics of northern Australia. Because of this, Martine and his colleagues have suggested that it be listed as “Vulnerable” as per the Red List Categories and Criteria of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

“There are rare and unusual species all over the world, just like this one, that deserve our appreciation and protection”” said Martine. “Luckily, many are already living within the boundaries of conservation areas like state and national parks in Australia, the US, and elsewhere.”

“However, the rise of anti-science and anti-conservation rhetoric in the US, especially, has put federal and state protected lands here at risk,” he said. “It also threatens the rich biodiversity our Founding Fathers celebrated and the American scientific enterprise they held so dear.”

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Original Source:

Lacey LM, Cantley JT, Martine CT (2017) Solanum jobsonii, a novel andromonoecious bush tomato species from a new Australian national park. PhytoKeys 82: 1-13. https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.82.12106

It seemed rather unusual that the largest tree genus, Syzygium, containing over 1500 species, was only represented by about a dozen of records on the biodiversity-rich island of Sulawesi, the latest new species description dating back to the mid-19th century.

One hundred and fifty years onward, a new article published in the open access journal PhytoKeys, highlights the large portion of undocumented plant diversity on the island, by introducing not one, but five new species to add to the abundant tree genus.

Conducting fieldwork on plant diversity and ecology of the tropical mountain forests of Sulawesi in the period 2006-12, a team of ecologists from the University of Göttingen had difficulties identifying plant specimens of the myrtle family brought back from their field surveys. They noticed that only some 14 species of Syzygium were known to occur in Sulawesi, surprisingly few compared to around 200 each in neighboring Borneo and the Philippines.

“In addition to the limited knowledge about plants in Sulawesi, we were dealing with what is probably the largest genus of trees in the world, the size of which was apparently putting off to many researchers of the past.” comments PhD student F. Brambach. “This is probably why our basic knowledge of the taxonomy of Syzygium hasn’t improved much since the early days of botanical exploration of the region in the first half of the 19th century.”

The ecologists turned to Dr Byng, director of Plant Gateway and Visiting Research Fellow at Naturalis Biodiversity Centre in the Netherlands, who is coordinating a global revision of Syzygium, a genus best known for the clove tree. To him the possibility of what appeared to be undescribed species came as no surprise.

“After extensive screening of herbarium specimens from Sulawesi, I had estimated around 90 additional species to be present on the island, most of which are not yet named and probably only occur there. This would mean we only currently known around 13% of the island’s real diversity,” explains the expert.

The potential number of new Syzygium still waiting to be described raises concern, especially when considering the fast rate at which tropical forests in Indonesia are lost. Sulawesi is no exception, with three of the five newly described species considered to be “endangered” following the criteria of the IUCN.

“In this time of rapid species loss worldwide, cooperation between field ecologists and herbarium taxonomists is important to document the vast diversity of organisms in understudied regions, such as tropical mountain forests, especially for large and complicated groups like Syzygium,” Dr Culmsee said.

Well-known for its unique fauna, the flora on the island of Sulawesi has received considerably less attention to date. With the publication of the new five species, the authors, Fabian Brambach, Dr Heike Culmsee, and Dr James W. Byng, hope to change this and instigate more botanical research in the area.

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Original source:

Brambach F, Byng JW, Culmsee H (2017) Five new species of Syzygium (Myrtaceae) from Sulawesi, Indonesia. PhytoKeys 81: 47-78. https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.81.13488

Additional Information:

The research was founded by by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst (Germany).