Kalāheo, Hawaiʻi  (August 9, 2019) — The National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) has named Dr. Nina Rønsted as its new Director of Science and Conservation. Rønsted will oversee the Science and Conservation Department at the Juliet Rice Wichman Botanical Research Center (BRC) at NTBG’s national headquarters in Kalāheo, Hawaiʻi on the island of Kauaʻi.

Dr. Rønsted comes to NTBG from the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen where she has held multiple research positions since 2002, serving as Professor of vascular plants, Herbarium Curator, Director of Education and most recently Director of Research (2015-2019).

As a botanist specializing in conservation science and ethnobotany, plant systematics, and the evolution of plant diversity, Rønsted has a Ph.D. in medicinal plant sciences from the University of Copenhagen and has held research fellowships at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK and the University of Minnesota.

Over the course of her career, Rønsted has explored the evolution of plant diversity and the relationship between people and plants with an emphasis on medicinal and other charismatic plants. She has conducted field work in Southeast Asia, South America, China, Australia, and various regions of Africa. In addition to her numerous international scientific publications, she is an enthusiastic science communicator.

Upon welcoming Dr. Rønsted to her new post, NTBG’s CEO and Director, Janet Mayfield said, “We are delighted to welcome Dr. Rønsted to NTBG and her family to Kaua‘i. Her experience and passion for plant conservation and ecosystem preservation are in perfect alignment with NTBG’s mission. Accelerated rates of plant extinction in Hawai‘i and globally, intensified by increasing threats to biodiversity, create an urgent need for the work of scientists such as Dr. Rønsted. We are looking forward to her contributions to research and conservation as she begins her career with NTBG.”

Upon her arrival at NTBG, Rønsted said, “NTBG is already an internationally renowned institution with excellent staff conducting critical research within tropical plant and conservation science. People and plants are tightly linked and I look very much forward to help further develop and communicate NTBG’s research program and provide science-based understanding and solutions to the local and international challenges of today.”

Dr. Rønsted succeeds Dr. David H. Lorence who has been employed by NTBG since 1987, serving as Director of Science and Conservation and Curator of the Herbarium (2002–2019). Lorence will remain on staff at NTBG, focusing his work on floristics, taxonomy, and systematics of Pacific Island plants. He will continue to serve as Senior Research Botanist and devote time to editing and publishing the Flora of the Marquesas (early 2020) and the Flora of Samoa.

NTBG has more than 20 staff working in positions directly related to science and conservation. The organization manages an 87,000 specimen herbarium, a seed bank and laboratory housing nearly 12.8 million seeds representing 694 taxa and cultivars, and over 100,000 accessions in the living collections which are located within NTBG gardens and preserves in Hawai‘i and Florida.

Additionally, the Science and Conservation Department is responsible for documenting biodiversity, adding wild-collected plants to the living collections, conservation efforts in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific through collection of seeds and cuttings, as well as supporting the work taking place in five preserves including the 987-acre Limahuli Preserve, located in one of Hawaiʻi’s most biodiverse habitats.

The National Tropical Botanical Garden (ntbg.org) is a not-for-profit, non-governmental institution with nearly 2,000 acres of gardens and preserves in Hawai‘i and Florida. NTBG’s mission is to enrich life through discovery, scientific research, conservation, and education by perpetuating the survival of plants, ecosystems, and cultural knowledge of tropical regions. NTBG is supported primarily through donations and grants.

For more information, visit: ntbg.org or email media@ntbg.org.

Limahuli Garden has reopened following more than a year of flood recovery efforts and is accepting reservations for self-guided and guided tours. The garden closed in April 2018 after historic flooding closed access to the garden and damaged infrastructure, trails, and plant collections. The garden’s hours of operation remain Tuesday through Saturday from 9:30 to 4:00.

Important Reservation Information

In order to manage traffic and reduce the impact vehicles have on the garden and surrounding community, reservations are now required for self-guided tours at Limahuli Garden. Hawaii residents with a valid driver’s license and North Shore Shuttle riders are exempt. Hawaii ID or North Shore Shuttle ticket must be presented at check-in for visitors without advanced self-guided tour reservations. For more information about the North Shore Shuttle, please visit their website at https://kauainsshuttle.com/.

Adopting more sustainable tourism practices will allow the Garden to benefit the community, the areas natural & cultural resources and our visitors who come to engage in this very special place. Actively engaging in the solutions to take care of our places is a reciprocal responsibility all of us share equally. These measures are steps we will take to preserve our rural community, enhance our visitor experience and ensure our places are resilient and prosperous for generations to come. We are hopeful as we step forward towards a future of sustainable tourism, that we all work together to support and honor our communities, places and each other. Make a tour reservation now. 

As a University of Hawaii graduate student in the early 1980s, Dr. Diane Ragone became captivated with the most important food-producing tree crop in the Pacific. That tree — breadfruit — changed Diane’s life, while she transformed people’s understanding of what breadfruit could do.

In her quest to collect, study, and curate what would eventually become the world’s most extensive living collection of breadfruit varieties and closely related Artocarpus camansi (breadnut) and A. mariannensis, Diane recognized that achieving breadfruit’s full potential was limited by seasonality, prompting her to seek an answer to the question: Is it possible to have year-round breadfruit production?

Overcoming the Short Breadfruit Growing Season

While long-lived and easy to grow, depending on the variety, breadfruit typically has one longer fruit-bearing season followed by a shorter season over a four to six month period, leaving six to eight months of the year without fresh breadfruit.

Called ulu in Hawaiian, breadfruit has sustained people for centuries, but its lack of year-round production has been a limiting factor in achieving a reliable, steady supply and greater commercial viability. Traditionally, Pacific Islanders have prolonged the availability of breadfruit through preservation methods such as drying and fermentation.

Diane knew seasonal scarcity could also be addressed by the careful selection of diverse varieties which would better enable breadfruit to serve as a reliable staple for reducing hunger in the tropics.

The seasonality of tree crops like apples, pears, citrus, nuts, and legumes has been studied by land-grant universities and farmers for decades, but the same was not true for breadfruit, largely because it wasn’t possible to get adequate quantities of good quality, uniform planting material.

The Breadfruit Institute

That changed as Diane curated and built the breadfruit collection at Kahanu Garden on Maui and established the Breadfruit Institute (BFI) which, thanks to its efforts in partnering with Cultivaris (Global Breadfruit), and the University of British Columbia Okanagan, to name but a few, have been able to advance the pursuit of year-round production.

In 1996 Diane embarked on a ten-year study of 150 varieties represented by 200 trees growing at Kahanu Garden. Five years into the study, Diane graphed dates for male flower production, five stages of fruiting, and yield estimates.

She examined which varieties were producing fruit month by month over the course of each year. Closely studying production peaks (between September and December in Hawaii) and dips, Diane focused on the varieties that provided fruit when others didn’t.

Genetic Diversity May Hold the Key to Overlapping Breadfruit Production

Drawing on years of records and field notes she’d recorded throughout the Pacific, Diane selected a group of 20 varieties to capture the maximum genetic diversity in order to achieve overlapping production. Each variety was examined intensively for nutritional value and other characteristics. That group was then pared down to around 10-12 varieties to be targeted as candidates for mass micropropagation and global distribution.

The Breadfruit Institute was the first to conduct such a study and today shares its methodology and offers data collection recommendations to other institutes and researchers. Additional breadfruit seasonality studies have since been conducted in New Caledonia, Fiji, Kiribati, and currently at the University of Hawaiʻi for which Diane has served as an advisor and provided trees through the Plant a Tree of Life project.

Today, as scientists report the grave environmental threats resulting from the global loss of biodiversity in the wild, after working with breadfruit for over 35 years, Diane has demonstrated the value of collecting, studying, and preserving agricultural biodiversity in order to overcome the limitations of seasonality, proving how diversity in crops can greatly enhance food security and provide environmental benefits as well.

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By: Jon Letman, NTBG

This story originally appeared in The Bulletin – NTBG’s quarterly magazine for members. Support plant conservation. Click here to become a member now.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) publishes the online resource The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, ranking taxa (species, subspecies, or varieties) in one of nine categories from ‘Not Evaluated’ to ‘Extinct.’ The Red List is an invaluable tool for not only scientists, educators, and policy makers, but for anyone seeking a better understanding of the conservation status of plants and animals around the world.

In recent years, conservation agencies, institutions, and organizations including NTBG have redoubled efforts to assess the more than 1,200 native plant taxa in Hawaiʻi. To date, over 500 (approximately 40 percent) have been assessed, reviewed, and published on the Red List. Among these, 266 have been assessed as Critically Endangered, 98 as Endangered, 60 as Vulnerable, and 51 are listed as Extinct or Extinct in the Wild, adding to the more than 20,000 plant taxa published on the Red List worldwide.

Species: Capparis sandwichiana (maiapilo) (Capparaceae)

Conservation status: Vulnerable (VU)

Capparis sandwichiana, a native Hawaiian caper, is a beautiful shrub found on cliffs, lava flows, emerged coral reefs, and in rocky gulches of coastal areas. It is endemic to several of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (Midway, Pearl and Hermes, and Laysan) and the eight main Hawaiian Islands. This species is threatened by non-native plants, goats, rats, fire, sea-level rise, and coastal development. Although the total population numbers in the thousands across its range, subpopulations, and suitable habitat continue to decline.

NTBG staff monitor and collect seed from plants in the wild and curate ex situ conservation collections. Currently, among 51 accessions, over 10,000 seeds are stored in our Seed Bank and Laboratory, 333 plants are growing in our nursery, and 46 individuals are planted out with permanent tags in our Allerton, Kahanu, Limahuli and McBryde Gardens. On Kauaʻi, wild individuals are tagged with unique identifiers to enable consistent monitoring and the ability to link collections back to maternal founders.

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By: Seana Walsh, NTBG Conservation Biologist

This article originally appeared in The Bulletin – NTBG’s quarterly magazine for members. Support plant conservation. Click here to become a member now.

On August 9th, NTBG staff, state and federal conservation partners excavated two Hawaiian Green Sea Turtle Nests at Lawai Kai. One nest was viable and the other failed likely due to high tides and surf. Staff and their families were invited to witness the release of the eight hatchlings.

Researchers suggest that as the impact of climate change and sea-level rise affect the northwest Hawaiian Islands, more turtles will come to nest on Kauai and the other main Hawaiian islands. Research is ongoing to determine if the females nesting on Lawai Kai are returning to the beach where they were born more than 20 years ago.

The Mt. Haupu Native Habitat Management Project launched in August and began with a cultural ceremony at the base of the Kauai peak. This project aims to improve and maintain native habitat for rare species including Polyscias bisattenuata, Kadua fluviatilis, Schiedea perlmanii, Myrsine linearfolia, and Isodendrion longifolium.

This project is a collaboration with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and will focus on improving habitat for rare species at the Haupu summit. “In this first phase of the project, we are surveying for additional populations of rare plants and weeding around known populations. said NTBG Curator of Living Collections, Mike De Motta. “We will also work on eradicating invasive woody species in the area,” he continued.

While there are many rare and endangered native plant species that call the summit of Haupu peak home, the project also aims to protect native insects endemic to the peak including one of the world’s largest species of tree cricket.  NTBG staff and conservation partners will monitor the rare plants and make collections of propagules for future restoration and possible outplanting in phase II.

By Craig Morell, Director, The Kampong

In the golden age of plant collecting a century ago, botanical explorers traveled the world in search of rare and unusual plants. Unfettered by modern agricultural regulations, they explored remote regions at will, surveying and searching for botanical gardens around the world. Dr. David Fairchild was one such collector. Credited with more than 70,000 collections over half a century, Fairchild spent a great deal of time in the Pacific Islands, especially the East Indies. Many important food and ornamental plants were gathered on these trips, including new varieties of mangos, avocados, palms, flowering trees, and interesting new fruit trees.

Cheng Ho Journey

Fairchild had a Chinese junk called the Cheng Ho built especially for his 1940 journey. As chief plant collector for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Fairchild had the huge task of finding new plants to help feed America. Some of the plants photographed in his books and assembled on those trips were introduced and can be found at The Kampong today. Fairchild started the Office of Plant and Seed Introduction very early in the 20^th century, giving him numerous opportunities to collect plants in many countries. Last September, I had the chance to retrace Fairchild’s extraordinary Cheng Ho journey.

Two years ago, Dr. Carl Lewis of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (FTBG) had an idea to revisit several of the islands where Fairchild traveled in 1940. The trip would also include a few islands left unvisited after Fairchild had to depart abruptly at the onset of World War II. What took David Fairchild weeks to reach — the Moluccas Islands — was for us just 25 hours away.

Dr. Lewis had arranged all of the stops on the 21-day tour, starting in Bogor, Indonesia where Fairchild studied at the Treub Laboratory at the Bogor Botanic Gardens on two separate occasions. The 210-acre garden is legendary for its vast herbarium and living collections and has been pivotal for its role in tropical botany.

Where Fairchild set sail on his Chinese junk in Ambon harbor, we left in a different fashion: boarding a modern twin-mast 132-foot Balinese schooner called the Ombak Putih, Indonesian for White Wave.

21 Days, 900 Miles

Our island stops — twelve in all — would be 50 to 100 miles apart, and as on Fairchild’s Cheng Ho expedition, the islands are mostly volcanic in origin. Cone-shaped and ringed with verdant bands of towering coconut palms, many of the islands are barely arable, with the only commerce taking place wherever there is enough land to build a small fishing village.

In following Fairchild’s journey, we hoped to find the islands where he had collected plants,  visit the villages he’d visited, and perhaps see some of the same trees he saw 76 years ago. Plant enthusiasts will understand our thrill, knowing that David Fairchild was one of the world’s foremost plant collectors and that some of us were from his former home The Kampong and the garden named for him.

David Fairchild’s Home and Legacy

As a point of reference, The Kampong (NTBG’s garden in Coconut Grove, Florida) was David Fairchild’s home from 1916 to 1954. FTBG was named after Fairchild late in the 1930s, and is seven miles south of The Kampong. Both gardens are on the Atlantic coast and enjoy a sub-tropical climate. The two gardens have had a long-standing relationship based on their namesake.

Our travels took us through a variety of islands where the balmy climate fostered a spectacular growth of plants with no heat or drought stress set upon them for decades at a time. Motor launches got us onto the beaches with little effort, although we were forced to quickly become accustomed to “wet landings” in which we waded through seawater to reach the beach.

Taxis and rented vehicles motored us to interesting forest areas to see plants that Fairchild would have seen, such as the famed Pigafetta palm, Hydnophytum ant plants growing on tree trunks, massive Dipterocarp trees, and many others. I took a copy of Fairchild’s Garden Islands of the Great East with me using it to track the islands on our journey as a check list of plants and sites to explore. We visited islands with lyrical names such as Kahatola, Halmahera, Mandioli, Ternate, Obi, Buru, and others.

Island by island we traced a 900-mile course, landing on one beach, then another, trekking through fascinating forests, each different from one another, all while gaining knowledge at every turn. A lecture preceded dinner every evening, usually followed by spirited discussions of the day’s events. Dr. Lewis and I re-created a photo from the Garden Islands book by posing in front of what we believe is the very same Hernandia tree seen in Fairchild’s book.

Curious Roots, Fruits, and Tubers

As we trekked through the Spice Islands[1], we could see and smell the reasons for the area’s historical name. The Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese battled fiercely over control of the islands for their natural bounties of nutmeg and cloves. In the West we are used to seeing these spices in small jars at large prices on market shelves, but in these islands we saw hundreds of pounds of the spices drying on tarps along the streets. The local village markets had heaps of spices, selling packets for just a few coins.

Following Dr. Fairchild’s methods, we toured several farmers markets, redolent with the smells of chili peppers, fish, and mollusks brought up from the depths, and a wide spectrum of curious roots, fruits, and tubers. We could imagine David Fairchild collecting seeds and fruits in such markets in 1940.

For all of us, recreating Fairchild’s Cheng Ho expedition offered the rare chance to experience the native habitats of many plants that are now in cultivation around the world. For a few brief

moments, we were intrepid travelers, collecting memories and photographs just as David Fairchild did 76 years ago.

Following this journey I can now look at some of the plants that David Fairchild collected and say to myself, “I know where that plant came from —  I was there.” Having experienced my own version of the Cheng Ho expedition and seen the native habitat of the plants I care for enriches and informs my role as one of the caretakers and preservers of the legacy of David Fairchild.

The Unlikely Discovery of the Tahina Palm

The unlikely discovery of the Tahina palm (Tahina spectabilis) is rooted in the story of Xavier Metz, a Madagascar-born Frenchman working as the manager of a cashew nut plantation in the island’s remote northwest. In 2006, accompanied by his wife and three young daughters, Metz happened upon several gigantic palm trees at the foot of a rugged limestone hill.

It wasn’t the first time they’d seen the enormous palms — on a weekend outing one year earlier they’d noticed the same palms. On their second encounter, however, one of the giant palms was bulging with a pyramid-shaped bunch of flowers.

After Metz shared photos of the mysterious trees with a fellow palm enthusiast, the challenge of identifying the palms grew into a discussion and then all-out investigation which ultimately led to their identification by renowned palm authority Dr. John Dransfield of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The Discovery of the Decade

Dransfield confirmed that the palms were not only a newly described species but an entirely new genus — a noteworthy event indeed. Dransfield called it “the palm discovery of the decade.”

This gigantic fan palm, the largest in Madagascar, bears a trunk that can soar to 60 feet and has fronds as large as 15 feet in diameter. The structure of the flowers and flower-bearing branches immediately indicated that it belongs to the tribe Chuniophoeniceae which includes palms native to Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Arabia.

The discovery was published in 2008 (Dransfield et al.) and ultimately named Tahina spectabilis after Metz’s middle daughter Anne-Tahina. In Madagascar’s Malagasy language Tahina means “blessed” or “protected.”

With only the one known population, the Tahina palm is listed as Critically Endangered (CR) on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Researchers have confirmed that the solitary Tahina palm is hapaxanthic — meaning it will produce flowers only once and then perish.

When the question arose of how to conserve this rare palm about which so little is known, there was agreement that not only did it need to be protected in its native habitat,  scientists agreed Tahina palm seeds should also be distributed to botanical gardens and arboreta throughout Madagascar and overseas.

A Safe Home on Kauai

In 2008 NTBG’s Conservation and Horticulture Center on Kaua‘i received three accessions (documented collections) of Tahina seeds. After successfully propagating seeds, the Garden planted out eight seedlings between 2011 and 2014 in McBryde Garden and near the entrance to the Garden’s headquarters in Kalāheo, Kaua‘i.

Six of the eight slow-growing palms have survived and are steadily inching skyward. While no one is yet certain how long the Tahina palm can be expected to live, it will likely be many decades before this remarkable new genus erupts with its tremendous display of flowers and seeds before the parent tree expires.

The addition of the Tahina palms to the living collections helps ensure that even if disease or disaster struck the sole known population on Madagascar, their irreplaceable DNA is preserved for the future.

Collectors of NTBG Bulletin back issues will find a photo story on NTBG’s early efforts to propagate the Tahina palm in the Spring 2008 issue (Volume XXV, No. 3, pg. 19).

Little known is the story of Polyscias bisattenuata (ohe ohe in Hawaiian), a critically endangered member of the Araliaceae (ivy family). Endemic to Kaua‘i and only infrequently found growing on slopes and ridges between 1,300 and 2,300 feet, in recent years ohe ohe was known from just two trees until 2005 when NTBG Research Biologist Ken Wood discovered some 30 individuals growing in a summit gulch and on the cliffs of Mt. Haupu.

Botanical Gold

Then, in the fall of 2016, working with the support of a grant from the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, NTBG’s Living Collections Botanist/Field Collector Natalia Tangalin struck “botanical gold” when she discovered 34 new trees in five populations (four of them previously unknown) while botanizing on the steep slopes and ridges of the forests of Haupu and Mt. Kahili. To date, NTBG has documented a total of 52 ohe ohe in seven populations.

Like many native plants in Hawaii, ohe ohe fruits are subject to predation by rodents. Natalia knew that between her return visits to the trees, the olive-shaped, purplish fleshy fruits would likely fall victim to rats. This sprawling tree is also threatened by habitat loss and invasive plants like strawberry guava and Koster’s curse. Add to that no known pollinator and you have a recipe for extinction.

Meanwhile, NTBG’s Oshibana volunteer artisan group had heard about the need to protect the vulnerable fruit and offered to design and sew rodent deterrent bags. Two volunteers, Maryanne Nordwall and Joanne Watson, experimented with different material, finally settling on woven plastic mesh sandbags which were readily available, flexible, and most important — rodent resistant. Together they sewed more than a hundred bags of varying sizes.

With Velcro-lined openings, the bags stayed firmly attached to tree branches while keeping out predators out but letting in light and air. The bags protected the fruit until they reached maturity and until Natalia and other field collectors and KUPU interns were able to return to harvest the fruit. Over multiple visits, they were able to collect some 55,000 seeds, adding 50 accessions to the Garden’s living collections.

Making a Comeback

Back at NTBG’s Conservation and Horticulture Center, Nursery Manager Ashly Trask, working with staff, volunteers, and KUPU intern Randy Umetsu, began the monumental task of squeezing out seeds from thousands of fruits to be cleaned, sorted, counted, and potted within hand-built cages (to protect from rats). Before long the south shore nursery was filled with a bright green sea of seeds popping out of a perlite-vermiculite substrate. Ashly said that the survival rate of young sprouts was around 80 percent. Now, less than a year later, NTBG has grown more than 6,000 plants.

With so many seeds, the question arises: can these seeds be dried or frozen and stored for later planting? Currently, ohe ohe seed storage behavior remains unknown but NTBG’s Seed Bank and Laboratory Manager Dustin Wolkis continues to test the seeds’ ability to withstand cold and dry storage conditions.

Already around 200 plants have been planted in the Lower Limahuli Preserve and many more will be added to the native section of McBryde Garden. NTBG is also working to re-establish populations within its former range on private lands. Mike DeMotta, Curator of Living Collections, said the successful collection of ‘ohe‘ohe helps secure genetic representation of the species in NTBG’s ex-situ collection, adding: “Our goal has been to create additional collections so if the population collapses in the wild, we’ll still have a broad representation of the species.”