How to keep plant species alive and away from extinction through the lens of a camera
Mamoní Valley Preserve
The Mamoní Valley Preserve is a 5,000-hectare land conservancy in one of the top 25 Biodiversity Hotspots in the world.
For hundreds of years, botanists have collected plants to describe species and keep in herbaria across the world. But while physical plant specimens are irreplaceable, photographs of plants are also an invaluable resource for botanical research, conservation and education.
Photographs preserve information that sometimes can be lost because the plant or flower dries, dies or loses color.?
All plant species known to science have samples preserved in at least one herbarium, as a species is not recognised unless there is at least one specimen officially stored in a collection somewhere in the world.
Unfortunately, and perhaps surprisingly, many plants have never been photographed in the field. For example, just 53% of the 125,000 known plant species in the Americas have field photographs in major online databases.
Because almost 40% of the world’s plant species are threatened with extinction, there’s a strong urge to photograph as many of these as possible before they disappear forever. Without photographs of these species in the field, many could go extinct without us even realizing.
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Botanists and researchers have produced lists of plants lacking photographs and hope their work stimulates both professional and citizen scientists to track down species and add photographs to public, discoverable repositories such as iNaturalist .
But it isn’t easy, as some species are a mix of very remote, hard-to-spot and often overlooked species. Finding them takes determination and botanical know-how. However, successful pictures could end up in identification guides, allowing both citizen and professional scientists to identify, monitor and conserve these species into the future.
This year at the Mamoní Valley Preserve, together with Geoversity and Fundación Biomundi, we are hosting an iNaturalist workshop for anyone from the Madro?o region in Panama interested in becoming a citizen scientist through a camera lens and to benefit from the iNaturalist app to get to better know the Mamoní and Madro?o valleys.?