The CRES field project in Cameroon recently said goodbye to our first fulltime volunteer. Jo Osborne (pictured), from England, came to Cameroon in August 2006 and spent the next seven months helping out with our botanical work. Jo has a master’s degree in plant taxonomy and spent most of her time at our research station collecting samples of leaves with flowers and/or fruit, which she was able to identify (mostly!) using often intricate floral characteristics that distinguish one species from another. This work is very important to our overall goals in several ways. The botanical composition of a rain forest is the foundation for the animals that live off the plants, whether directly (as in the case of folivores, or leaf eaters, and frugivores, or fruit eaters) or indirectly, by eating the animals that have eaten the plants.

Jo collected well over 300 different plant species during this time. One copy of each species is kept in the National Herbarium of Cameroon in the capital, Yaoundé, and the rest are to be sent overseas to the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where they are available to the rest of the botanic world for taxonomic identification purposes and to document their existence in this part of Africa.

Victor Nana, National Herbarium of Cameroon, with an amazing flowering Rubiaceae plant

CRES has had a long-standing relationship in Cameroon with specialist botanists from both Yaoundé and Kew for more than five years, and we host regular visits from international experts. In April, we hosted botanists from Yaoundé, Kew, and Wageningen, in the Netherlands. I joined their search as an enthusiastic amateur: I have been collecting plant species eaten by gorillas, chimpanzees, forest elephants, and drills for many years now but have little knowledge of other species, whose fruits may be eaten and thus dispersed by smaller animals (such as bats), or may disperse with air currents.

Barbara Mackinder takes a sample of the new legume tree species

There was one species in particular that Drs. Barbara Mackinder and Jan Wieringa wanted to find desperately: a large tree that has only been collected once, decades ago, but in the same region as the Ebo forest. It is a member of the Fabaceae (Bean Family). There is only one collection of the species known to science, and it had not even been named yet because insufficient flowers and fruits had been collected to allow for a full scientific description. Imagine our delight to find it on day one of the five-day trip within 300 meters of our research station! Not only that, but within a 10-yard radius of the tree were four other leguminous tree species, one of which is another unnamed species! This species will be named after the Ebo forest, one of what we anticipate to be many new species to be found in this forest, one of the last remaining gems of rain forest found in this biodiversity rich area of Africa.

Meanwhile, we are currently arranging for our second botanist volunteer to join our team starting in July, when she finishes her undergraduate degree. Emma Fenton has visited Ebo once before, with a team from Kew in 2005, and so knows a little of what to expect in the coming months of documenting and discovering the diversity of plant species in the Ebo forest.

Dr. Bethan Morgan is a Conservation Research Fellow for the San Diego Zoo’s CRES.
Read Bethan’s previous blog, Recording the Primates of the Ebo Forest

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