Conservation

Planting a Hope

• Byline:PAT GAO
• Publication Date:02/01/2010

Inside a KBCC greenhouse (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)

Taiwan is developing one of the top plant shelters in the world.

Toward the end of 2009, Taiwan hosted the third Directors’ Meeting of South East Asian Botanic Gardens, with attendees from 14 countries taking part in activities that included a visit to the Dr. Cecilia Koo Botanic Conservation Center (KBCC) in the southernmost county of Pingtung. The visitors were impressed by the center’s scale and some of the world’s finest plant collections. Named after the mother of center sponsor Koo Cheng-yun, chairman of Taiwan Cement Corp., the KBCC has eight greenhouses occupying some 12,500 square meters spread across five acres of the Koo family’s farm in Pingtung’s Gaoshu Township. As of mid-November 2009, the total collection amounted to 11,858 plant species and varieties, and is expected to expand to 30,000 within two decades to become one of the top plant shelters in the world. In some plant families including Orchidaceae, Bromeliaceae and Begoniaceae, as well as the Pteridophyta division, the collections of the conservation center are already among the world’s richest.

The KBCC was formally opened in January 2008, making it the first private plant conservation site in Taiwan. To a great degree, the center is the result of efforts by its director, Li Chia-wei, who also teaches biology in the Department of Life Sciences and Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in Hsinchu, northern Taiwan, where the 2009 directors’ meeting was held. Li tapped corporate support for building a “Noah’s Ark” of tropical and subtropical plants, the most diverse groups of plants on the planet, explaining that preservation is crucial not only for biological research, but also for medical science and the agricultural sector. According to the KBCC’s description, the center seeks to help sustain the Earth’s rich biodiversity as climate change and human activities now threaten the survival of many species around the world, explaining that for quite some time, deforestation has been occurring at a faster rate than the natural or assisted expansion of forests. This led Li, as the editor in chief of Scientific American’s Mandarin edition, to talk about the KBCC in a somewhat melancholic tone in a recent issue of the magazine. “They praise the results of our work and I feel proud, but in fact, we are all in a low mood,” he writes. “These treasures from the wide jungles that now jostle each other pot by pot [at the KBCC] like prisoners might offer hope for the future restoration of wild diversity, but this is likely to be a very vague hope as these plants’ habitats have become farmlands that are still unable to meet increasing food demands.”

Taiwan has a long history of plant research and classification since the mid-19th century thanks to the island’s wide geographic, and resultant climatic, variations that produce great biodiversity. The western low-lying plains rise eastward toward East Asia’s highest peak, Jade Mountain of the jagged Central Mountain Range, only to drop abruptly into the Pacific Ocean. More than 670 Pteridophyta or fern species, for example, are native to Taiwan including the rare aquatic Isoetes taiwanensis DeVol, discovered in the early 1970s in Yangmingshan National Park, north of Taipei City. There are many more kinds of ferns that spread across the island, grown from fern spores borne on seasonal winds. One of oldest plants on the planet, ferns can grow in deserts, swamps and high mountains, with their greatest diversity displayed in tropical forests. The more than 850 fern species and varieties held by the KBCC account for a significant part of the center’s collection.

Attendees of the third Directors’ Meeting of South East Asian Botanic Gardens visit KBCC. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)

Located south of the Tropic of Cancer, which traverses southern Taiwan’s Chiayi County, the Pingtung area has an obvious geographic advantage for the healthy growth of tropical plants. Other major plant conservation programs include the Royal Botanic Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank Project in London, which recently marked the collection of seeds from 25,000 species, or 10 percent of all the world’s wild plants, and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault built in Norway, which stores crop seeds in a cave on an Arctic island. These projects focus on temperate plants that are preserved in seed form in a low temperature, low humidity environment. Such a state, however, is unsuitable for the preservation of seeds from tropical plants. Moreover, the KBCC largely collects living plants.

KBCC director Li Chia-wei also serves as CEO of the Dr. Cecilia Koo Botanic Conservation and Environmental Protection Foundation, which has pledged NT$100 million (US$3 million) in funds over five years to support the center’s work. The professor previously served as director of the National Museum of Natural Science in central Taiwan’s Taichung City, and is now the president of the museum’s foundation. The natural science museum is home to a botanical garden of more than 2,000 kinds of plants and was the largest formal collection of plants in Taiwan up until the launch of the KBCC. The other major repository of plant species is the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute under the Cabinet-level Council of Agriculture (COA) through its greenhouses and immense tracts of managed forestland. The exact number of plants preserved by the institute is unknown, however, as much of the forestland is wilderness and the species there have not been surveyed.

The KBCC, aiming at conservation and research efforts, is not open to the general public, but grants access mostly to researchers and teachers at high schools and universities.

KBCC is located on a farm belonging to the Koo family in southern Taiwan’s Pingtung County. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)

Role to Play

Chen Chun-ming, the KBCC’s collection manager, believes that while botanical gardens also contribute to plant conservation, they often have other concerns such as attracting visitors. Fan Yi-bin, who has worked as an associate scientist of the COA for the Taipei Botanical Garden, notes that difference, saying that his organization focuses on education for the general public, while the KBCC is like the plant version of a game preserve that protects a wide range of living species.

Chen points out that, for major plant conservation projects, target species are either preserved in their original habitats or moved to well-managed greenhouses under the “ex-situ” model, which his center adopts. Although researchers prefer to do observation and study in the original environment, more often than not a preservation center is the best option available because it can be difficult to designate a piece of land for conservation purposes, given that doing so often runs counter to local economic activities. On the other hand, sometimes the original habitats simply no longer exist. For example, the major typhoon that struck Taiwan in August 2009 is believed to have wiped out the wild population of a newly described orchid, Cheirostylis rubrifolius, previously found on a mountain in Pingtung County. Fortunately, two individual specimens survive in the KBCC. Among other endangered indigenous species stored at the center, Pyrenaria buisanensis of the Theaceae family had been considered extinct for decades before two plants were discovered in 2003 by hikers on a mountain in Pingtung County.

The KBCC’s collection targets a dozen plant families that also include Araceae, Asclepiadaceae, Gesneriaceae, Marantaceae, Musaceae, Palmae, Rutaceae and Zingiberaceae. These are significant tropical species of which Taiwanese researchers and the business sector are fairly knowledgeable. Experts from other organizations also help with the center’s collection efforts. For example, rare foreign Musaceae plants and seeds have been introduced to the center by the COA’s Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute, as well as the semi-official Taiwan Banana Research Institute in Pingtung’s Jiuru Township, established in 1970 for development of banana crops, which are one of Taiwan’s major agricultural exports. Taiwan also exports hundreds of thousands of ornamental foliage houseplants such as Zamioculcas zamiifolia, also known as ZZ plants, bromeliads and ribbon plants each year mostly to Southeast Asian countries. At home and abroad, potted plants are widely used to soften architectural rigidity, freshen the air or sometimes to enhance positive energy in living spaces in accordance with the principles of feng shui.

Orchids make up nearly half of the KBCC’s current holdings. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)

Taipei Botanical Garden’s Fan Yi-bin says that, in comparison with government organizations, the privately run KBCC is more efficient in plant collection and exchanges with other experts in the field. “It’s quite important for different types of botanical gardens in the world to cooperate and set up exchanges with each other,” Fan says. During the third Directors’ Meeting of South East Asian Botanic Gardens held at the NTHU campus, seeds from local plants were exchanged with those of other member states including Malaysia, Singapore and Myanmar. Cooperation on plant conservation is also developing toward a Southeast Asian union in which Taiwan could play a leading role.

Among the KBCC’s collection, orchids far exceed any other type of plant, with more than 5,800 species and varieties that account for nearly half of the center’s total holdings. The world’s most diverse flowering plants, orchids represent a highpoint of plant evolution with about 25,000 known natural species largely distributed throughout tropical Asia as well as Central and South America. Of the 338 orchid species indigenous to Taiwan, the KBCC’s extensive collection ranges from the common Taiwanese orchid Haraella retrocalla to rare kinds such as Saccolabiopsis wulaokenensis.

There is an evident enthusiasm for orchids in Taiwan that has resulted in the extensive development of orchid cultivation, leading it to become a full-fledged industry. For one thing, the government spent more than NT$2 billion (US$60.6 million) on the establishment of the Taiwan Orchid Plantation located in southern Taiwan’s Tainan County. This biotech science park is the venue of the annual Taiwan International Orchid Show.

The center includes a significant collection of fern species. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)

Commercial Potential

Tainan County Magistrate Su Huan-chih was selected by a domestic magazine as one of the 100 most successful managers in 2009 for helping create a record high of NT$3.6 billion (US$109 million) in export orders for the orchid park, despite the ongoing global financial crisis.

Fan points out that the commercial potential of plant cultivation, such as that of orchid breeding, provides enterprises with an incentive to develop plant collection and research projects like the KBCC. “It requires some time, one or two decades, to see real results, though,” he says. “As the collection swells and trees grow, the increasing financial and human resources needed to maintain the project will test management competence and durability.”

In addition to collection and preservation efforts, the KBCC and other botanical gardens cultivate endangered plant species for reintroduction to their natural environment. This often proves to be a difficult mission, however, as it is complicated by problems such as possible plant infection by bacteria, as well as factors affecting birds or animals helpful to the plant’s existence. Li notes that, taking orchids as an example, some species rely on certain birds or insects for pollination and the absence of these creatures would put the orchid’s survival in danger. Therefore, the Hsinchu meeting organized by Li called for multidisciplinary cooperation from experts in fields including botany, microbiology and zoology in the attempt to sustain plant diversity.

“It’s our job to work together with different experts and organizations to contribute significantly to tropical plant research and conservation for Taiwan and for the world,” says KBCC collection manager Chen Chun-ming.

Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com