Biodiversity inventory and informatics in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Rapidly changing land use in Southeast Asia threatens plant diversity, and reduces the time we have left to document it. Despite over 200 years of scientific plant exploration, many plant species have yet to be discovered. Moreover, we still have a very poor understanding of the distribution of known taxa in this biogeographically complex region. We review the current state of biodiversity exploration, using plants in Indonesia as an example. Traditional methods of collecting and describing species have provided a solid foundation for our understanding of plant biodiversity, but are insufficient for the pragmatic task of rapidly discovering and documenting today's biodiversity before it is gone, because general collecting expeditions tend to be infrequent, and documentation of most new species must await taxonomic revisions many years in the future. Solutions to this exploration and documentation crisis (i) could use the abundant resource of enthusiastic, networked, national biology students, (ii) should employ biodiversity informatics tools to efficiently engage both specialists and parataxonomists, and (iii) might require adoption of new types of a-taxonomy, utilizing increasingly low-cost molecular methods and high resolution photographs. We describe emerging technologies that will facilitate this Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (

Establishing species distributions in large tropical plant genera: insights from twelve new Thai records of Oberonia (Orchidaceae)

“…Without disregarding the obvious need for continued field exploration (e.g. Giam et al 2010, Webb et al 2010, these figures suggest that many gaps in the currently known distributions of Oberonia species could be filled based on critical herbarium studies alone. We furthermore consider it likely that the same would be the case for many other tropical plant genera that share the characteristics of being widespread and rich in small inconspicuous species.…”

An Effective Wood DNA Extraction Protocol for Three Economic Important Timber Species of India

“…UBC834 (AG) 8 YT, UBC874 (CCT) 4 , UBC848(CA) 8 RG, UBC857 (AC) 8 YG) ISSR primers amplified. The universal SSR markers rbcL (5'-AACACCAGCTTTRAATCCAA-3') and MatK (5'-GGGTTGCTAACTCAATGGTAGAG-3') primers [22] were used to validate the quality of extracted wood DNA.…”

“…Identification of plant species traditionally relies on morphological characters of especially leaf, flowers and fruits, which for trees can be time consuming to access and only present during parts of the year. Accurate identification in species-rich or taxonomically complex groups also typically requires genomic DNA that is not always available, especially in tropical forest samples [3] [4]. Teak (Tectona grandis f; verbanaceae), Black Rosewood (Dalbergia latifolia f; Fabaceae) Ben Teak (Lagerstroemia lanceolata f; Lytheraceae) are incredibly significant economic timber species in tropical countries chiefly in India, Indonesia, Myanmar and Burma.…”

Biogeography and conservation in Southeast Asia: how 2.7 million years of repeated environmental fluctuations affect today’s patterns and the future of the remaining refugial-phase biodiversity

“…Although progress is being made (e.g., SAMD 2008; Scholes et al 2008;GBIF 2009;Webb et al 2010), occurrence records based on specimens and sightings are typically buried in notebooks or herbarium sheets and rarely in searchable archives. Dated records are important as scientists attempt to document range shifts; e.g.…”

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