Sunday, March 21, 2010

By robin robinson Key West Garden Club

Key West lies just outside the biodiversity hot spot in the Caribbean. A biodiversity hot spot is defined as a place where there is enormous diversity of animals and plants, many endemic to the area whose northern island is Cuba.

"It's like the Garden of Eden flowing out of the ground," said Stephen Hodges, botanist and speaker at the afternoon lecture at the Key West Garden Club last week. Hodges is a research collaborator with Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and an honors graduate of Florida International University. He recently worked at the Key West Tropical Forest and Botanical Gardens on Stock Island.

He is doing vegetation monitoring in Everglades National Park, working on the Hole-in-the-Donut restoration project, which involves removing invasive plants that sprouted after the land was farmed.

Land cleared of invasive plants as recently as 2004 is now grasses, sedges, wildflowers and marsh. This wet prairie grows after the land is scraped down to the bare rock. Periphyton, a spongy mat 2 inches thick, is made up of algae, diatoms and an assortment of organisms that provide the base nutrients for the recovery of the marsh.

Hodges also is associated with Bridges across Borders working to save the Darien Gap biodiversity hot spot in Panama from development. This is a politically touchy place to work as the indigenous Indians do not like people showing up. Since the time of European exploration, these Indians have successfully defended their land, greeting interlopers with a barrage of poisoned arrows and spears.

The Darien Gap area is 36 percent of the land mass of Panama and 86 percent of the forest cover. The Pan-American Highway ends here in Yavira. Then there is the wild terrain of Darien Gap before the road continues in Turbo, Colombia. This area provides a bridge in which wildlife and plants flourish.

The tribes of Embera (warriors) and Wounaan (crafts) exist with the Afro-Panamanian and Kuna. The people who produce crafts, woven baskets and carved wood and nuts needed to know how to harvest the palms without killing them.

Their main source of fronds for their tightly woven baskets came from chunga, the black palm (Astrocaryum standleyanum). Regrettably, its trunk is covered with 6-inch thorns. In order to get the supple fronds in the center of the crown, they cut the palm down.

Hodges established a nursery in Panama to make the palms self-sustaining so that the natives could manage their resources.

There are 9,518 identified species of plants in Panama. There are 2,662 species identified in Darien Pass. Hodges thinks that there are 5 ,000 to 6,000 more species to be identified. That number would be equal to the entire flora in Florida.

Plants like the tagua or vegetable ivory (Phytelephas seemannii) is used for small carvings. You might see one that is a frog sitting on top of a round stone. The plant's leaves get to be 6-7 feet tall and then they fall over and a new plant grows from the tip of the old one and the old one dies. They walk through the jungle, the same plant existing for thousands of years.

Internationally, some 25 biodiversity hot spots that equal 1.4 percent of the land surface support 60 percent of the world's plant, bird, mammal, reptile and amphibian species. They have many plants that are endemic to the area, meaning that they do not exist anyplace else on earth.

Hodges had some advice for Key West environmentalists about how to handle the protection of its biodiversity:

• In order to keep the trust of the community, there must be transparency in all that you do.

• The community must participate in the planning.

• The plan should require participation that is not limited to economic donations.

• Environmental workers must understand the political and cultural dynamics of the community.

• Creating a "continuity of knowledge" is critical.

The Key West Garden Club welcomes volunteers to pull weeds, propagate and play in the sandy soil from 9 a.m. to noon Mondays.

Master gardener Robin Robinson was a columnist at the Chicago Daily News and syndicated by Princeton Features. This column is part of a series developed by the Key West Garden Club, http://www.keywestgardenclub.com. A compilation of her columns, "Plants of Paradise," is available at the Garden Club.