Where dry gardens wilt

It's a dead place. More than two million dried and poisoned plants and plant parts, accumulated over two centuries, are lying in rows of wooden and steel cupboards at the Central National Herbarium in Howrah, Kolkata. Some of these specimens are among the oldest in Asia.

One such is a 320-year-old sprig of Cyperus procerus, a type of sedge that grows profusely in marshy places like swamps, paddy fields and pools across the world. It was collected in June 1696 from an area somewhere between Fort St George and Tirupati in Chennai by an East India Company surgeon, Samuel Brown. Since his arrival in Chennai, then called Madras, Brown was fascinated by the abundance of plants around him and their many therapeutic uses by the communities.

This was the period of scientific renaissance, and scientists worldwide were trying to understand the living organisms around them. Brown wanted these plants to be documented. He would send samples of plants, dried and preserved between sheets of blotting paper along with notes on their local names and medicinal uses, to his friend James Petivar in London. Petivar, who was then a fellow of Royal Society of London, described Cyperus in the 1704 issue of Philosophical Transactions, the world’s first science journal. Some of Brown’s samples eventually made their way to the National Herbarium in Melbourne, Australia, which in 1900 gifted the Cyperus specimen to Howrah herbarium.

Known as one of the largest in the world, the Howrah herbarium also has 2,583 coloured illustrations from the 18th century that were commissioned by William Roxburgh, often referred to as the father of India Botany. It also houses more than 15,000 type collections—specimens that were used by taxonomists to describe and name plants—and a set of 12,000-odd plant specimens, collected by Nathaniel Wallich, who was superintendent of the herbarium’s botanical garden between 1815 and 1846. Dried, pressed and treated with poisonous chemicals, these specimens have been carefully stitched on sheets of cartridge paper or kept preserved in bottles of alcohol, with labels attached to indicate their identity, name of the collector, and when and where they were collected.

These illustrations and specimens are not?just relics. They are critical to today’s research. By providing information about plants in the past, they offer a time-lapse view of their evolution, spread or extinction, and help track invasive species and climate change (see ‘Breathing out of a time warp’,).

There are around 100 such herbaria across the country which boast of a similar wealth of information. While the Howrah herbarium and its 11 regional centres, representing different biodiversity zones, are part of the Botanical Survey of India (BSI), a premier research institute of the Union government, the remaining are part of university departments and non-government research institutes. Many of these are specialised herbaria. For example, the National Herbarium of Cultivated Plants under the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (NBPGR) focuses on cultivated plants. The herbarium at the Forest Research Institute at Dehradun records forest resources.

Unfortunately, very few people are aware of their significance. Worse, compared to most herbaria in other parts of the world, Indian herbaria do not receive adequate government attention for their upkeep, modernisation and enhancement. The apathy is clearly visible from the meagre funds they receive.

FORGOTTEN IN CUPBOARD

Herbaria in the country struggle due to lack of funds


Herbaria need to carry out frequent excursions to enrich their collections. Once collected and identified, these specimens need to be preserved and catalogued, which requires skilled human resource and infrastructure. But herbaria in the country do not have enough funds for this.

This is no different for the 11 herbaria under BSI, which is under the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC). A 2014 MOEFCC report shows a steady increase in the fund the ministry received in the past 10 years: the amount increased from Rs 280 crore in 1992-93 to Rs 2,430 crore in 2013-14. Of the funds received in 2013-14, MoEFCC set aside Rs 1,564 crore for biodiversity conservation. But BSI receives just a small fraction of the fund. In 2013-14, it received Rs 15.87 crore. In 2014-15, it received Rs 18 crore. A large part of the fund, say BSI authorities, goes into paying salary and maintenance of infrastructure.

Other herbaria are left to their own devices. Ujwala Bapat, director of Blatter Herbarium at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, says maintenance of the herbarium requires more than Rs 6 lakh a year. Established in 1906 by Swiss priest Ethelbert Blatter, the herbarium maintains 200 type specimens and over 200,000 samples. Some of these specimens date back to the 19th century. “Due to lack of funds we have to depend more on poisonous chemicals to preserve plant specimens instead of using air-conditioners and dehumidifiers,” says Praveen Kale, assistant curator of the herbarium.

To meet the expenses, Blatter Herbarium charges a fee: Rs 500 per herbarium sheet from those who want to study a type specimen, Rs 250 per day from those studying general herbarium specimens, and Rs 200 per photograph of the sheet. It also charges Rs 250 for identification of plants and an authentication certificate which is necessary to be submitted with a PhD thesis. But this does not amount to much as hardly 15 researchers visit the herbarium in a year to study type specimens and 50-odd for referring to herbarium sheets. The authorities have also turned to philanthropic organisations. “This year, we received Rs 2.5 crore for modernisation from the Sir Ratan Tata Trust. Using the fund, we plan to digitise our samples (see ‘making of e-herbarium’,). After this, we would charge only for type specimens,” says Rajendra Shinde, vice-principal of the Department of Biological Sciences at St Xavier’s College, who was curator of the herbarium for eight years.

The herbarium at the Department of Botany at the University of Delhi, which houses 8,000 specimens, including some of the sheets prepared by J K Maheshwari who has authored Flora of Delhi, has managed to modernise its herbarium using a one-time grant from the university in 2013.

But these herbaria need more funds to harmonise with global standards. One such step requires them to shift from the present classification system, based on morphological features, to a system that arranges organisms as per their genetic make-up. BSI has set up a laboratory in Shillong and begun genetic profiling of plants, but says it has no immediate plans to shift to the new system. “Many genera and families of plants are yet to be resolved in the system. Moreover, morphological features are still the most important tool to understand and differentiate biodiversity” says Paramjit Singh, director of BSI. Besides, genetic profiling requires huge funds.

There is also a lack of will to protect these rare bioresource. S P Khullar, former professor of botany at the Panjab University, Chandigarh, says how valuable collections in the university herbaria are wasted. “As old researchers retire, their specimens were thrown out to make space for new researchers. I had to see my collections being burned. Many specimens were from places where collection is no longer possible,” he says. Khullar had studied Himalayan plants, particularly ferns, for three decades and has authored four books on the subject.

The government did wake up to the importance of herbaria six years ago. In 2009, it released a special grant of Rs 15 crore each for BSI and the Zoological Survey of India to upgrade their infrastructure and institutional capacity. That year, MoEFCC, set up a taskforce headed by ecologist Madhav Gadgil to help these institutions prepare an action plan, a vision document 2020 and figure out ways to spend the special grant. The taskforce made a number of recommendations, including digitisation of the database; making these organisations part of international collaborative projects like Biodiversity Heritage Library and Consortium for the Barcode of Life, an initiative that supports development of DNA barcoding as a global standard for species identification; and most importantly to make them autonomous “Based on the recommendations, we have sent our action plan to MoEFCC. We are yet to hear from it,” says Singh.

The recommendations are crucial for the future research on biodiversity, particularly at a time when excessive restrictions by National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) is limiting access to biological resources and the scope of research.

FUTURE COMPROMISED

Do excessive restrictions imposed by the biodiversity authority help?

With six climate zones, India is one of the 17 megadiverse countries in the world—at least 47,791, or 11.4 per cent, of the world’s 0.4 million plant species are found in the country. To safeguard the rich biodiversity and promote its conservation, sustainable use and equitable sharing of benefits arising from using the resources, the government in 2002 enacted the Biological Diversity Act. The following year it established NBA in accordance with the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity. A biological specimen can now be sent out of the country only if it is in accordance with the rules set by NBA, which has a multi-step approval process to prevent biopiracy and patent claims by foreign companies and researchers.

Though the Act initially did not consider herbarium specimens as separate entity, to address the concerns of some taxonomists the MoEFCC in November 2014 introduced a separate provision into the Act. The Guidelines on Access to Biological Resources and Associated Knowledge and Benefits Sharing Regulations, 2014, allow sending or carrying biological resources, including preserved herbarium specimens, says R S Rana, member of NBA and former director of NBPGR. Under the new provision, the applicant does not need to pay a fee to NBA, he adds.

However, these revisions have not encouraged the NBA or herbarium authorities to share specimens with researchers. BSI sources say none of its 11 herbaria has shared specimens with researchers within or outside India in the past year.

Scientists say excessive restrictions by NBA are a major hindrance in biodiversity-related research, which cannot be done in isolation.

For instance, those studying phylogenesis and taxonomy need to study living plants as well as specimens deposited in herbaria worldwide. But NBA’s cumbersome approval process often dissuades foreign researchers from studying Indian specimens.

Quentin Groom, researcher at the Botanic Garden Meise, Belgium, is trying to determine the genetics of Oxalis corniculata, a weed found across the globe, and understand how it has evolved. To study its Indian variety, Groom would need to collaborate with an Indian researcher, or travel to the country to collect the sample. In either case, he would have to apply for NBA’S permission and pay it a fee. “This is global research. I can’t afford to pay for specimens if countries are not willing to share. As of now, my only source for most Asian countries is to find old herbarium specimens already in Europe and extract DNA from these. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work very well as DNA degrades with time,” he says. “I just have to accept that there will be a big hole in my global study.”

Till September 1, NBA had approved only 193, or 18 per cent, of the 1,071 applications it received under access and benefit sharing of bioresources. An analysis by Down To Earth shows that approval of the applications mostly depends on the whims and fancies of the NBA chairperson. About 40 per cent of the applications were approved in just two years­—35 between 2008 and 2009 when four chairpersons were in-charge of NBA for a few months each, and another 42 during 2014-15, after the approval process was made time-bound.

The approval process also affects Indian researchers, particularly those who have to consult foreign experts about their experimental biological material. This often require sending the material to foreign experts. But under BDA, researchers do not have ownership over the biological resource they possess and cannot share it with anyone they wish.

The NBA is clear that it will not weaken provisions under the Act. “The Act provides for facilitated access to biological resources. It does not prohibit but only regulates,” says Hem Pande, chairperson of NBA. If a project is collaborative research project as notified by the competent authorities under the Act, then germplasm exchange could be allowed, he adds.

Such restrictions are important to check the exploitation of the country’s natural resources, says Anil Gupta, director of the National Innovation Foundation, an autonomous body of the Department of Science and Technology. Foreign researchers are not willing to enter into collaborative research. “We should not allow unilateral exchange of material. Indian researchers are not labourers to collect plant material for foreigner researchers. The research has to be mutually rewarding, and there should be recognition, reciprocation and reward for the Indian researcher too,” says Gupta, also a member of the NBA.

NEEDED: NEW POLICY

Biodiversity-related research cannot be done in isolation


The distribution of plants does not stop at national borders, and individual species must be understood throughout their entire ranges in order to be classified properly. But due to restrictions, Indian plants are poorly understood than those of Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, peninsular Malaysia, Russia or Thailand, says Peter H Raven, president emeritus of Missouri Botanical Garden, USA. In fact, the country is fast losing out in its effort to understand its plants. The number of plant collections in the country is unusually low. Indian researchers do not use all the available techniques to study plant specimens. But above all, the country is failing to use its biological resources for national and international benefits due to its bureaucracy, restrictive laws and poor international collaborations, Raven adds.

Some researchers suggest different policies for live plants and dry herbarium specimens.Herbarium specimens are poisoned and cannot be used for propagation of the species, says Arun K Pandey of the Department of Botany, University of Delhi. “So exchanging them with foreign researchers does not pose a risk of biopiracy.” He suggests that NBA should give some leeway to taxonomists to interact with others. “Without collaborations, neither can we carry out taxonomic revisions and name changes, nor add new information from genetic data to our studies and create global monographs of plants,” he says.

It is also important to distinguish academic research from research for commercial application, says Patrick S Herendeen, senior director at Chicago Botanic Garden in the US. A botanist extracts DNA from a specimen to understand how it is related to other plants, while a scientist with commercial interest extracts the DNA to put into another organism for financial benefit, says William R Buck, senior curator at the New York Botanical Garden, USA. “But often politicians make laws that treat herbarium specimens like archeological artefacts,” says Buck.

The NBA should develop a code of conduct for exchange of herbarium specimens with the world herbaria, suggests G S Rawat, taxonomist with the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun. This is especially important as a large number of herbaria outside the country have plant specimens collected from India, he says.

Indian scientists also suffer because of such restrictive policies. There is a lot of international collaboration happening these days between scientists in many different countries, and Indian scientists and students are not benefitting from this as much as they could in part due to the restrictive policies, says Herendeen.

It is clear that excess of control is making it difficult for Indian scientists to carry out meaningful research. NBA’s heart might be in the right place but it would be a shame if the biodiversity that belongs to the people fails to help them. It is also clear that if India wants to protect its biodiversity and benefit from it, the government would have to help the herbaria enrich their treasure. There is an urgent need to increase funds for BSI and other herbaria so that they can protect the existing specimens and carry out frequent excursions to enrich their collections. With its limited fund, BSI adds around 5,000 new specimens each year to its collections. This year, it has reported 173 new species and genera of plants. Singh says BSI needs more budgetary support.

There is also a need to create awareness about the rich history of herbaria. If museums can survive, so can herbaria.

Breathing out of a time warp   While preserving plants or plant parts in a herbarium, collectors neatly label the specimens, indicating their identity, name of the collector, and the time and place of collection. These details offer a time-lapse view of their existence. From studying plant evolution, mapping diversity and correcting age-old botanical errors to tracking plant diseases, conservation efforts and climate change, herbaria offer a deep insight into the environment CORRECT THE ERRORS DNA extracted from centuries old plant specimens can help track origin of species and correct taxonomical error. One such error crept into taxonomy in the early 1930s, when an American expert erroneously clubbed a wild watermelon variety with the cultivated variety, which has sweet and succulent red pulp. The type specimen of the wild variety at the herbarium in Sweden was collected by Carl Peter Thunberg from South Africa in 1773. He had described its fruits as dry and bitter and covered with woolly hairs. But the American expert merged Thunberg's sample and the cultivated variety, under one species Citrullus lanatus. And since Thunberg's type specimen was from South Africa, it was assumed that the true watermelon must have originated there. The confusion was cleared recently, after scientists extracted genetic material of the type specimen and compared it with the cultivated variety. The cultivated variety evolved in tropical West Africa, and diverged from its wild relative three million years ago. The findings were published in New Phytologist in 2014. MAP PLANT DIVERSITY Bengaluru-based non-profit ATREE has recently used herbarium specimens to address the issue of species-specific conservation. Though Phyllanthus emblica is generally considered the Indian gooseberry or amla, ATREE researchers found that another species, P indofischeri is also an important source of the fruit. While P emblica is widely distributed across Southeast Asia, P indofischeri is endemic to the Deccan Plateau and not found anywhere else in the world. ATREE researchers studied amla specimens at various herbaria and observed that the two species have a distinct distribution pattern. But the forests of Deccan Plateau are of poor quality and are being mined or cleared for infrastructure development. "Using details of herbarium collections and Geographical Information System, we have developed a map for P indofischeri, which could be used for conservation of the tree," says Rengaian Ganesan, in-charge of the herbarium at ATREE. TRACK CLIMATE CHANGE Herbaria offer the evidence of climate change. For instance, scientists in the US and China analysed the flowering time of 10,295 herbarium specimens of Himalayan rhododendron, collected since 1884, to investigate the climate-driven change in flowering time. They found that the plant starts flowering 2.27 days early with every 1oC rise in annual temperature, and 2.54 days later per 1oC warming during the spring season. This shows that rhododendron's response to warming is variable. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 5, 2014, suggests that herbarium specimens can be used to understand the impact of climate change on plants. KNOW THE TARGET TO CONSERVE Do invasive species maintain their dominant status over a long period, or do new ecological and evolutionary forces eventually develop to limit their populations? To understand this, researchers from University of Illinois in the US studied 140 years of herbarium records of garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), Eurasian species that has invaded forests in the northeastern and midwestern US. The species managed to proliferate by producing a toxin that does not allow other plants to grow in the area. Analysis of the specimens showed a marked decline in its toxin production in every 50 years. The pattern was consistent with the finding of slowing A petiolata population growth and rebounding of native species in the region. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009. Conservators can carry out such studies to identify recently invaded areas, where the maximum damage occurs, and act accordingly. CULTIVATE INVESTMENTS The specimens at herbarium provide a wealth of information at one place, and this helps save money. For example, most genetic studies require collecting plant samples from around the world. A study demonstrates that sampling from herbarium collections is one way to avoid the trade-off between projects that are feasible and those that are exciting. Large sets of herbarium DNAs could also be the key to an array of novel, ambitious studies of plant diversity, say the researchers who have successfully extracted DNA from almost 100 herbarium specimens collected between 1970 and 2010. This suggests that expanding herbarium collections is more important than ever. The study was published in Applications in Plant Sciences in June 2015. PEST FINDERS Quite often while preserving plant specimens, pests on them also get preserved. The genetic material of the pathogen can be extracted from the herbarium specimens and help scientists track the disease. The feasibility of such experi-ments was proved recently when US scientists used herbarium specimens from 1887 to 2006 to identify two fungal species that cause soybean rust—Phakopsora pachyrhizi and P meibomiae. The study was published in Plant Disease in May 2015. IDENTIFY NEW SPECIES Plant species look nearly identical. To identify new species, researchers need to compare its morphological features with herbarium specimens. Recently, researchers of University of Delhi have found a new species of Indigo in Himachal Pradesh. They named it Indigofera himachalensis. It has longer and hairy pods and larger seeds that are greater in number per pod than its closest relative I heterantha. This genus now has 60 known species of which 15 are endemic to India, says Arun K Pandey, taxonomist with the university.

Hugh Cleghorn, Madras Presidency's first forest conservator, surveyed forests in Himachal in the 1860s to maintain a steady flow of timber for the East India Company. In 2014, Henry Noltie, a botanist, toured the areas Cleghorn had visited to study the changes in the landscape

For East India Company’s surgeons, India’s rich biodiversity provided a diversion from the drudgery of daily life. Hugh Cleghorn, a sur-geon and magistrate based in Shimoga (now Shivamogga districtin Karnataka), spent his leisure time studying the flora around him in the 1840s. The area boasted tracts of old forests of teak (Tectona grandis). He would commission local artists to draw these specimens and his collection of over 3,000 paintings finally found its way to the library of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE).

For years, these drawings lay forgotten in files. Their discovery in 1998 presented a challenge. “We had to first establish that these were part of Cleghorn’s collection and then find out more about him, why he had made the collection, and to identify the plants in the drawings, and the artists who made them,” says Henry Noltie, a botanist at RBGE.

Noltie is writing Cleghorn’s biography and his research has led to three excursions—the first to Shivamogga where Cleghorn was based in the 1840s, then to the sal (Shorea robusta) forests of Odisha, which he was partly responsible for protecting, and which are still there, and finally to the mountains in Himachal Pradesh last year, which were surveyed by Cleghorn for timber.

Cleghorn's journey

By the middle of the 19th century, exploitation of the timber in Shivamogga was rampant. Cleghorn linked it to shifting cultivation in forest areas and got such agriculture banned. Ill health took him to the UK where he talked about unscrupulous felling of forests in India. In 1850, Cleghorn and three other East India Company officers were commissioned by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) to study “the probable effects, in an economical and physical point of view, of the destruction of tropical forests”. Their report was read at a BAAS meeting at Ipswich in 1851. The report stressed on the need for a department to scientifically manage India’s forests.

His recommendation was the first of its kind in the British Empire. This eventually led to his appointment as the first conservator of the Madras Presidency in 1856. With this and the earlier appointment of Alexander Gibson, a surgeon in Bombay, the East India Company surgeons became important players in the history of forest conservancy in India.

Cleghorn is known as a pioneer forest conservator in India. His “conservancy” had little to do with modern conservation, but was a sustainable means of supplying timber like teak and deodar (Cedrus deodara) to the expanding railways in those times. He managed the forests scientifically and raised plantations for fuel and timber.

Documenting change

Cleghorn was summoned in 1862 by Lord Canning, Governor-General of India, to survey the forest resources of Punjab, in particular the forests of deodar, which grew on Himalayan slopes in the valleys of four of the five Punjab rivers—the Beas, Sutlej, Ravi and the Chenab. He left a detailed account of this journey. His diaries contained lists of plants, notes on medicinal and other useful plants, instructions for paper-making from bark, notes on items of trade (from borax to agates) and birds, along with anecdotal information about the people he met. In August 2014, Noltie retraced the Himalayan journey to see how the landscapes had changed during the past 150 years. He left Delhi on August 7 on a bus to Manali in the Kulu Valley.

He then went to Shimla, where Cleghorn had met Dietrich Brandis, who worked with the British Imperial Forestry Service, to discuss a national forest policy. This meeting led to the first Indian Forest Act of 1865. He then went to the lower parts of the Pabar river and Kotghar in the Sutlej Valley. Noltie found that the forests there are astonishingly intact above 2,500 m and more extensive than they were in Cleghorn’s time. There are extensive stands of blue pine (Pinus wallichiana), Himalayan spruce (Picea smithiana), West Himalayan fir (Abies pindrow) and deodar. But the deodar trees that Cleghorn wanted to exploit, are no longer “exploited”. They are preserved today to protect watersheds.

The valley of Beas in Manali too had some large deodar forests, though much of the valley is now an enormous apple orchard, notes Noltie. In the valley of the Chenab, good forests still exists. A villager gave Noltie a piece of salajit, a black medicinal mineral that oozes from rocks at high altitude and is collected by men dangling from ropes, as Cleghorn had mentioned in his diary. Below the Sach Pass at almost 4,000 m Noltie found the beautiful ice-blue flowers of one of the Himalayan poppies, Meconopsis aculeata. Cleghorn had sent its seeds to Kew and Edinburgh. At Chamba in the valley of the Ravi, Noltie visited the old palace that Cleghorn had visited. The place has now been converted into a government school. A couple of more places and Noltie was back to Delhi, tracking in three weeks what Cleghorn had done in three months. Cleghorn’s technical report of this journey was published as Reports upon the Forests of the Punjab and the Western Himalaya in 1864.

“I was surprised how much forests were left in the deep valleys of the Chenab and the Ravi. But if one looks through Google Earth, one sees how incredibly narrow ribbons these are, and how much has been lost everywhere but the steepest slopes, where the trees have been left to prevent erosion,” says Noltie.

Noltie’s work is part of a series of studies on East India Company surgeons from Scotland and their botanical researches, and is being carried out at RBGE. A biography of Cleghorn and a volume containing colour reproductions of the 170 most interesting drawings in the Cleghorn collection are also scheduled to be published soon.