Lauraceae in Madidi: Interdisciplinary collaboration for the rapid discovery of problematic plant diversity

Accurately and consistently identifying species is integral to conducting biodiversity research, from understanding how individual species evolved and wider ecosystems function, to predicting how they might respond to climate change. Yet, for many groups of tropical plants, this fundamental task is extremely challenging, thanks to the overwhelming diversity of tropical forests and our limited knowledge of many plant groups, hindering attempts to document, understand and protect Earth’s most biodiverse and threatened terrestrial ecosystems. This project will combine resources and expertise in an interdisciplinary partnership between plant systematists and tropical ecologists working at the hyper-diverse and highly threatened interface between Amazonia and the Tropical Andes biodiversity hotspot, where both undocumented taxonomic diversity and uncertainty about the impacts of climate change are at their highest. It will test a novel approach to addressing these challenges and rapidly and accurately resolving the diversity and ecology of poorly known plant groups in the Tropics. For systematists working to understand the evolutionary origin and contemporary distribution of plant diversity, the partnership will accelerate the discovery and description of new species, and provide an comprehensive account of the diversity, distribution and evolutionary relationships for one of the most species-rich and ecologically important families of trees in Bolivia’s Yungas Ecoregion Lauraceae. Meanwhile, for ecologists it will lead to the development of new tools for rapidly and accurately identifying sterile plant material in forest monitoring plots, and allow us to test the likely impacts of climate change on a comprehensive, taxonomically verified dataset, and – crucially – how these results differ from current estimates. Lauraceae is among the most diverse and ecologically important families of trees in tropical Andean forests. Abundant across elevations, co-evolved with the Tropical Rainforest biome, and a vital source of food and shelter for many animals including humans, it is the most species-rich family of trees at intermediate elevations and thus a potentially excellent model group for understanding the potential impacts of climate change on tropical forests. But accurately identifying Lauraceae trees is remarkably difficult, with almost half of individuals essentially unidentifiable, even by experts. Working in the Madidi Project in the Bolivian Yungas, the partnership will begin with joint workshops where unidentified voucher specimens from forest monitoring plots are compared with verified herbarium reference collections held by the three participating institutions to formulate putative species identifications. DNA from representative individuals will then be used to rapidly and empirically test the validity of each of these putative species. This genomic verification will underpin new species descriptions, improved identification tools based on readily available vegetative characters and DNA barcodes, and the collation of detailed and comprehensive distribution and functional trait data. Finally, the resulting taxonomically verified dataset will be used to test whether species are migrating in response to climate change in one of the most ecologically important but poorly known families of trees in tropical forests. The Madidi Project provides an excellent opportunity to test and refine an approach to tropical biodiversity research that integrates skills and resources from both tropical ecologists working in forest monitoring plots and systematists working in biodiversity reference collections held in global herbaria, at a time when an accurate and comprehensive understanding of the biodiversity and ecology of the Earth’s most biodiverse and threatened terrestrial ecosystems has never been more important for their continued survival in the Anthropocene.