Meet the Scientist

Name: Corine Vriesendorp
Position/Title: Conservation Ecologist/Botanist
Department: Environmental and Conservation Programs

1. What do you study related to biodiversity (what are your research questions, what organisms do you work on)?

Rapid Biotic Inventories:
In conjunction with other scientists at the Field Museum and in Latin America, I conduct rapid inventories of plant communities in unprotected, and often unexplored, areas in the Neotropics. Plant diversity at a single locale in some of these areas can exceed 1500 species! Rather than focus on a particular family or genus, we tabulate the number of species in the entire assemblage of vascular plants in an area, and compare this diversity to better studied sites in the tropics. In this way, we can highlight sites high in endemic species, or overall species diversity.

Long-term Seedling Dynamics:
As an extension of my dissertation research, I continue to monitor the natural dynamics of the seedling community at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica with the help of my field assistants, Ademar Hurtado Flores and Martin Cascante Arce, and my co-collaborator, Richard Kobe at Michigan State University. In a km long strip, just one meter wide, we have marked nearly 20,000 germinating seedlings of 350 odd woody plant species over the last three years.

We mark only newly germinating seedlings, and with our short census interval (six weeks), we can accurately age these seedlings, and closely follow their fate. Our study provides basic germination and survivorship information for a dynamic, diverse, and poorly known early life history stage of tropical plants. However, the primary goal of our research is to use our long term monitoring of seedling dynamics to understand the processes that structure the seedling community, and ultimately, promote diversity in the adult community.

2. How do you study biodiversity (for example, what technological tools and methodologies do you use in your research)?

Rapid Inventories:
Just like naturalists traveling along the Amazon in the 1850’s, modern tropical botanists still collect plants with clippers, press them in newspapers, and preserve them in alcohol. Similarly, we still walk through a forest or ride a canoe down a river, scribbling notes on all the species we encounter to assess plant diversity.

However, we also use more sophisticated tools, such as satellite images and helicopter overflights, to identify different vegetation types across much larger landscapes. With the advent of digital photographs, we can send photographs of live plants directly to specialists for identification within hours or days, rather than the typical months or years for dried specimens. Finally, since more herbaria are scanning their dried specimens and placing them on the web, we can make quicker comparisons to our collected material.

Long-term Seedling Dynamics:
Again the procedure is basic—marking seedlings as they emerge, and following their fate over time. As there is no distinct seasonality in this forest, seedlings can and do germinate at any time of year—with some species germinating year-round, and some germinating only once in 3 years. With extreme temporal variability in seedling emergence, we use fairly sophisticated techniques, a combination of standard survival analyses and maximum likelihood methods, to examine and analyze species differences in seedling survivorship.

3. Where do you study biodiversity?

Latin America

4. How might your research have implications for biological conservation?

The overarching goal of a rapid biotic inventory is to use the biological results from an area, combined with social asset mapping in the surrounding communities, to directly motivate formal protection of that site. Governments are very unlikely to protect places that are entirely unknown—therefore this preliminary biological and social data is critical to conservation.

Seedling germination and survivorship strategies can be used to inform natural regeneration projects in degraded forests, although currently there are no direct applications of this research. However, its basic premise—to understand the mechanisms that maintain diversity in tropical plant communities—can be considered important to biological conservation, if we include an understanding of tropical forests as critical to their preservation.

5. How did you become interested in science? What made you want to be a scientist, and how did you get to The Field Museum?

When I first traveled to a Bolivian rainforest in 1992, my whole life changed. In my second year of undergraduate studies, I undertook a small research project as part of large-scale demographic study of Mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla, Meliaceae) in a lowland Bolivian forest. Although Mahogany is a valuable and heavily logged timber, very little is known about the environmental conditions necessary for Mahogany seedling growth and regeneration. With a goal towards designing logging practices that more closely mimic conditions of natural regeneration, I designed a study to examine the growth responses of naturally occurring Mahogany seedlings to different light levels.

Every day at dawn and dusk, I dragged a camera and a hemispherical lens through the rainforest in search of Mahogany seedlings, much to the amusement of the Chimane field assistants. They laughed at most things I did, and they couldn’t understand how I could claim to be studying forests and Mahogany, yet know so little about either. For two months, I learned from direct experience, as I was stung by Pseudormyrmex ants streaming out of Triplaris trees, furiously singled out by paper wasps in light gaps, and most memorably, spent long hours pressing and identifying plants. Unlike anything before, tropical ecology captured my imagination completely.

After returning to campus heady from my recent experiences in Latin America, I designed a unique semester abroad field study, proposing to spend the summer and fall semester doing an autoecological study in Bolivia on a domestic timber species, Hura crepitans (Euphorbiaceae), for my undergraduate thesis. Few such self-designed proposals are approved at Princeton, and I feel strongly that the Deans decision to endorse my project profoundly affected my life. Those six months sobered my idyllic view of tropical forests.

For when I returned to Bolivia the following year, I found that much of the mahogany had been logged, often within our study sites. Even though national policies governing acceptable timber cutting limits were overall environmentally sound and informed, timber concessions disregarded them and impacted vast tracts of forests through unrestricted harvest. Secondary impacts of the timber concessions, primarily through road construction, created additional ecological problems such as increased colonization and elevated hunting pressure. This was my first direct exposure to land use change and conversion. For the next three years, as I worked as a field assistant in Bolivia, Costa Rica, and Ecuador, I saw this same pattern repeated again and again. Watching forests being cleared for seismic lines in Ecuador, I realized tropical forests didn’t have time for me to study them at my leisure—they were systematically disappearing.

After 5 years of graduate work at Michigan State University, I started a position as a Conservation Ecologist/Botanist with the Environmental Conservation Program at the Field Museum. As part of the Rapid Biological Inventory Team, I am able to combine my fascination with tropical diversity, especially plants, with my concern for preserving the remaining wild places in tropical countries.

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