New Plant Collections from Madagascar

Representing the Diversity of Madagascar’s Grassy Biomes

Madagascar’s grassy biomes are sometimes viewed as little more than degraded forest ecosystems and of little conservation importance. One of my current projects (MADGRASS) is investigating the origins and dynamism of grassy biomes using population genomic techniques, but we also take time time sample the diversity of all plants in these open habitats and generate basic ecological data. We use a sampling procedure outlined by Lehmann et al. (2022) ¹ that allows us to discover and quantify most of the diversity in a given area.

The 2022 field season resulted in 13 ecological plots in addition to some spontaneous collection of targeted grass species. In total, 219 new voucher IDs were generated and most have silica-dried tissue samples available. I view the collection of tissue that allows us to pair DNA and ecological data vital to the future of large-scale biodiversity science. Some of the grasses have population-level silica samples available. My personal work will utilize Loudetia simplex but other collections will exist in perpetuity as a resource for future research into tropical grasslands. As expected, grasses were most common in open ecosystems, but the sedge diversity was fantastic and fabids were also frequent. Morning glories and their allies were often found in areas with recent disturbance such as fire, grazing, and agriculture. Here is a family-level representation of the collection: