Colombia has made impressive progress in declaring a large part of its Amazon rain forest protected for conservation. But there's another rain forest in Colombia, the Chocó, on the Pacific side of the country. This forest teems with even more species than in the Amazon forest, but it is not as well protected. Conservation biologist Stuart Pimm recently visited the region to see the biodiversity for himself.

By Stuart L. Pimm
Special contributor to NatGeo News Watch

Ten days ago I was in Colombia with my Colombian graduate student German Forero Medina, about to give a keynote address on REDD--Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation -- the subject now uppermost in the minds of those of us who care about biodiversity. (Read about REDD on my earlier blog on NatGeo News Watch.)

I wasn't going to go that far without taking time to visit one of the most diverse rain forests on Earth--the Chocó, along the country's Pacific Slope.

Colombia has more than one rain forest. The most familiar is the Amazon.

This has been a good few weeks for the Amazon, so that news first.

Just over a week ago, Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced that only 7,000 square kilometres (2,700 square miles) of the Brazilian Amazon were cleared in the 12 months to August 2009. [NatGeo News Watch: Amazon deforestation slows as Brazil tightens prevention.]

That's by far the lowest rate since the country's National Institute for Space Research started using satellite imagery to monitor forest losses.

Neighbouring Colombia has much less of the Amazon compared to Brazil, but it too has been losing forest cover.

At the International Forum on Biodiversity and Climate Change on the November 6, Environment Minister Carlos Costa told his audience in Bogotá: "It is important for the world to know that the Colombian Amazon is for conservation only." I was in the audience.

The Colombian government was making more than bold statements. At the Protected Areas Conference and on the Biodiversity Forum two weeks earlier (October 26, also in Bogotá), the country announced the creation of the Yaigoyé Apaporis National Par --an area of over 1,000,000 hectares (4,000 square miles) in the Amazon close to the equator.

Even before that addition, Colombia had exceeded the targets for conservation it had agreed to meet by signing the Convention on Biological Diversity. Signers agreed to set aside 10 percent of their land for protected areas by 2010.

With this latest addition, Colombia has protected 12.5 million hectares of its country--about 49,000 square miles, or 11 percent of the country-- an area a little smaller than the State of Florida. Some 70 percent of the protected land is in the Amazon.

Here's the problem that had me at the second meeting--and German Forero Medina at both meetings: Colombia is spectacularly rich in biodiversity. (Ask any birdwatcher. Colombia has nearly 1,900 species, more than any other country and 19 percent of the world's total. It has a similar excess of mammals and amphibians.)

But rich in species though the Amazon might be, it's Colombia's other forests that have even more species--and they are not been given the same protection. German and I were in Colombia to argue for more reserves outside Colombia's Amazon.

Conservation biologist Stuart L. Pimm visits Colombia's Chocó rain forest. There Jorge Orejuela, director of the Cali Botanic Garden and an expert on the Chocó's birds and orchids, tells Pimm about the remarkable orchids and other species in one of Earth's biodiversity "hotspots."

Video by Stuart L. Pimm

One of those regions, the Chocó was where I headed after the meeting. The old road from Cali to Buenaventura is "the best area in the world for seeing a rich diversity of birds," according to Steven Hilty and William Brown, authors of the Birds of Colombia.

How could I resist? This is one of 25 "biodiversity hotspots"--places that my Duke University colleague Professor Norman Myers and colleagues showed contained half of all the variety of life on Earth--in about 10 percent of the land surface. By definition, hotspots are also places where there's been large losses of habitats.

22 feet of rain a year

Resist? Well, easily, it happens. Dripping wet mountain forest, some areas getting 7 metres (22 feet) of rain each year sounds wonderful, but tragically, it's been a war zone. Coca grows well here. The consequence of U.S. citizens being unable to "just say no" to cocaine have played havoc with Colombia and scarred the lives of millions of its people. Armed conflict and anti-government guerrillas had been active in the Chocó.

But all my Colombian friends were cautiously optimistic about the reduction in violence in the last few years. So I set off with Jorge Orejuela, an old friend with whom I shared a house in graduate school decades ago.

Jorge won the prestigious National Geographic/Buffett Award for Leadership in Conservation in 2007. He's the director of the Cali Botanic Garden and an expert on the Chocó's birds and orchids. And he won the prize for his efforts to protect the Chocó's forest.

Photo of orchid Dracula wallisii by Luis Mazariegos

In the rain, our 4x4 slipped and slid down the narrow dirt road, from Cali to the coast. Then we turned into the watershed of a large reservoir, showing our permits to the Colombian military who guard the area.

The next morning the rain let up. Jorge spotted orchids everywhere--many were small and I missed them. Close up, they were lovely.

"Here's a branch covered with orchids." Jorge pointed them out. "There's an orchid in the genus Pleurothallis--perhaps it's a new species...There are a hundred or more new species being described every couple of years from this genus in Colombia and Ecuador."

Video still by Stuart L. Pimm

Later, standing in the middle of a small river, looking at its bank covered in showy Sobralia orchids, Jorge continued, "Biodiversity here is unbelievable. Along this gradient from the Andes to the lowlands, we may have 1,500 species of butterflies and 800 bird species." (That's half as many again as birds that nest in all of Europe and North Africa.) "Orchids--perhaps 1,000 species."

"There's high human pressure on this area. My work that was highlighted by National Geographic was protecting areas that, had they been destroyed, the endemic species--those that we found only within them--would have been lost for ever."

Photo of orchid D. syndactyla by Luis Mazariegos

Just how many species are found only in these areas, I wondered. "And how many species are still unknown to science here," I asked Jorge.

"It's hard to tell," he said. "In one area, not knowing anything about orchids, we collected 400 species--and that was not the only thing I had to do. This was in an area of only 30 square kilometres." (About 12 square miles).

"Easily 20 percent of those species were new to science...Many of those are endangered--they are rare and found only in those particular places."

Professor Stuart L. Pimm is a conservation biologist at Duke University, North Carolina. A former member of the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration, Pimm is the author of dozens of books and research papers, including the book "The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth."

Read earlier blog posts by Stuart Pimm>>

Photos on this blog entry by Jackson Xu/FFI

Magnolias are blooming in gardens everywhere, but nearly half of the species of the famous flowring tree are now threatened with extinction in the wild, experts at Fauna and Flora International (FFI) warn.

Often described as the aristocrats of the plant world, magnolias produce large, beautiful flowers. But in the wild they are used as a source of timber, food and medicine for local communities, FFI said.

"Sadly almost half the known species of magnolia are now threatened with extinction," FFI Global Trees Campaign coordinator Georgina Magin said in the news release. "Most magnolias take a long time to start flowering and until then they are not reproducing, which means they are very vulnerable to over-exploitation. Without urgent action many of these gems of the forest could be lost forever."

Magnolias have been cultivated for centuries. Some specimens growing in Chinese temples are believed to be 800 years old and they are still very popular as ornamental plants in gardens, FFI said.

About two thirds of magnolia species are found in Asia, with more than 40 percent of these in southern China. Almost half of all wild Chinese magnolias are now at risk of extinction. One species, Magnolia sinica, is reduced to just 50 trees in the wild.

The remaining species are found in North and South America, where they are also dying out.

Global Trees Campaign

The Global Trees Campaign, a joint partnership between FFI and Botanic Gardens Conservation International, has been working to conserve some of these wild species.

Over the past two years they have been working with partners in Yunnan Province in southern China to increase the wild population of Magnolia sinica. They have already planted 400 nursery-grown saplings in a nature reserve and these are now being tended.

This is providing a much-needed lifeline for this endangered species, FFI noted. "Survival rates appear to be high so far and it is hoped this project could be used as a model to restore more of these glorious species in their natural habitats."

Photo by Jackson Xu/FFI

Experiments show that growing duckweed on hog wastewater can produce five to six times more starch per acre than corn, according to researcher Jay Cheng. This means that ethanol production using duckweed could be "faster and cheaper than from corn," says fellow researcher Anne-Marie Stomp.

Photo of duckweed by Mike Yablonski/Courtesy NC State University

"We can kill two birds--biofuel production and wastewater treatment--with one stone: duckweed," Cheng says in a university new release. "Starch from duckweed can be readily converted into ethanol using the same facilities currently used for corn," Cheng adds.

Corn is currently the primary crop used for ethanol production in the United States, the release says. "However, its use has come under fire in recent years because of concerns about the amount of energy used to grow corn and commodity price disruptions resulting from competition for corn between ethanol manufacturers and the food and feed industries.

"Duckweed presents an attractive, non-food alternative that has the potential to produce significantly more ethanol feedstock per acre than corn; exploit existing corn-based ethanol production processes for faster scale-up; and turn pollutants into a fuel production system."

The Duckweed System

The duckweed system consists of shallow ponds that can be built on land unsuitable for conventional crops, and is so efficient it generates water clean enough for re-use, NC State says. The technology can utilize any nutrient-rich wastewater, from livestock production to municipal wastewater.

Large-scale hog farms manage their animal waste by storing it in large "lagoons" for biological treatment. Duckweed utilizes the nutrients in the wastewater for growth, thus capturing these nutrients and preventing their release into the environment.

In other words, Cheng says, "Duckweed could be an environmentally friendly, economically viable feedstock for ethanol."

"There's a bias in agriculture that all the crops that could be discovered have been discovered," Stomp says, "but duckweed could be the first of the new, 21st century crops. In the spirit of George Washington Carver, who turned peanuts into a major crop, Jay and I are on a mission to turn duckweed into a new industrial crop, providing an innovative approach to alternative fuel production."

Photo by Roger W. Winstead, North Carolina State University

Cheng, a professor of biological and agricultural engineering, co-authored the research with Stomp, associate professor of forestry, and post-doctoral research associate, Mike Yablonski.

The research, which is funded by the Biofuels Center of North Carolina, was presented March 21 at the annual conference of the Institute of Biological Engineering in Santa Carla, California.

Cheng and Stomp are currently establishing a pilot-scale project to further investigate the best way to establish a large-scale system for growing duckweed on animal wastewater, and then harvesting and drying the duckweed, NC State says.

Photo courtesy South African Tourism

New species of flowering plants called proteas are exploding onto the scene three times faster in parts of Australia and South Africa than anywhere else in the world, creating exceptional 'hotspots' of species richness, an international team of scientists reported today.

"Something special is happening in these regions: new species of proteas are appearing notably faster than elsewhere, and we suspect this could be the same case with other plant species too," said Vincent Savolainen, a biologist based at Imperial College London and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, one of the authors of the new study.

"This study proves that the abundance of different kinds of proteas in these two areas isn't simply due to normal rates of species diversification occurring over a long period of time.

"This is the first step towards understanding why some parts of the planet with a Mediterranean-style climate have become species-rich biodiversity hotspots."

But the program also gives people with a lot of time something to do.

"I need help from people who have long periods of time available to observe and measure the growing mosses, access to extensive space to lay out flats of plants, and fresh minds to put forward innovative solutions," says Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College, who runs the program with funding from the National Science Foundation.

Her researchers are inmates at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a medium security prison in Littlerock, Washington.

Photo courtesey Nalini Nadkarni of Evergreen State College