The Harapan rainforest, the Indonesian site that has been saved from logging by the RSPB and others, now boasts a number of plant as well as bird experts.
Staff have just benefited from a week of training by three specialists from Kew, whose visit was funded by the UK government's Darwin Initiative, and should now be collecting their very first plant specimens to send back to Kew's dried plant collection.
Amongst the plants found by the Kew scientists, Gemma Bramley, Tim Utteridge and Alison Moore, during their stay at Harapan in Sumatra, was a relative of the Christmas berry, a low growing shrub belonging to Myrsine family.
Also discovered in this once-logged remnant of precious lowland rainforest was a member of the nettle family called Urticeae Poikilospermum, which does not sting and is an endemic plant to Sumatra.
Just as Kew announced the opening, at its south-west London HQ, of the world’s first gallery dedicated to botanical art, another door was pushed ajar by the completion of the scientists’ mission to train Harapan staff in identifying and recording the plants around them.
For not only will their discoveries, the first batch of which is expected back any day, add to the many reasons for saving Harapan from the loggers. They will also add to Kew’s already impressive Herbarium – its store of dried plant specimens from across the globe.
About 30 staff at Harapan now have some knowledge of the Harapan’s plantlife and six of those passed the Kew training course with distinctions. Part of their time will be spent collecting plant specimens, pressing them and sending them on to Kew Gardens and Indonesia’s own Bogor Herbarium.
Kew believes that Harapan has become an important resource for rainforest plants because so much of the island’s vegetation has gone. That makes the work of Burung Indonesia, BirdLife and the RSPB itself extraordinarily important.
We have raised just over half of the £2 million the RSPB is contributing to Harapan’s running costs over the next 50 years.
Click here to find out more about this ground breaking project
And here for details of the Darwin Initiative