Rodrigo Cámara-Leret

University of Zurich | UZH · Institut für Systematische Botanik

Significance The knowledge of nonliterate societies may vanish in silence jeopardizing indigenous peoples’ livelihoods. Yet, this cultural component is missed by studies on ecosystem services that have historically emphasized the biological dimension. Here we fill this gap by introducing indigenous knowledge networks representing the wisdom of indi...

The need to understand nature’s contributions to people and across a broad spectrum of cultures and ecosystems is increasingly advocated in science assessments and policy decision-making for sustainability. However, for services such as food and medicine, gaps in existing studies on indigenous and local knowledge may preclude inclusive assessments....

New Guinea is the world’s largest tropical island and has fascinated naturalists for centuries. Home to some of the best-preserved ecosystems on the planet and to intact ecological gradients—from mangroves to tropical alpine grasslands—that are unmatched in the Asia-Pacific region, it is a globally recognized centre of biological and cultural diver...

Significance The United Nations proclamation of 2022–2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages aims to raise global awareness about their endangerment and importance for sustainable development. Indigenous languages contain the knowledge that communities have about their surrounding plants and the services they provide. The use of pl...

The cultural keystone species (CKS) concept (i.e. ‘species that shape in a major way the cultural identity of a people’ as defined by Garibaldi and Turner in 2004) has been proposed as part of a common framing for the multiple entangled relationships between species and the socioecological systems in which they exist. However, the blurred and proli...

Tropical forests occupy small coral atolls to the vast Amazon basin. They occur across bioregions with different geological and climatic history. Differences in area and bioregional history shape species immigration, extinction and diversification. How this effects local diversity is unclear. The Indonesian archipelago hosts thousands of tree speci...

Tropical forests occupy small coral atolls to the vast Amazon basin. They occur across bioregions with different geological and climatic history. Differences in area and bioregional history shape species immigration, extinction and diversification. How this effects local diversity is unclear. The Indonesian archipelago hosts thousands of tree speci...

New Guinea is the world’s largest tropical island and a globally significant biodiversity hotspot. Palms dominate the rainforests of New Guinea, from exquisite, forest floor palmlets to graceful canopy giants, and are vital for local people who depend on them for survival. Palms of New Guinea is the first comprehensive account of these immensely i...

Plants sustain human life. Understanding geographic patterns of the diversity of species used by people is thus essential for the sustainable management of plant resources. Here, we investigate the global distribution of 35,687 utilized plant species spanning 10 use categories (e.g., food, medicine, material). Our findings indicate general concorda...

There are growing calls for conservation frameworks that, rather than breaking the relations between people and other parts of nature, capture place-based relationships that have supported social-ecological systems over the long term. Biocultural approaches propose actions based on biological conservation priorities and cultural values aligned with...

Protecting nature’s contributions to people requires accelerating extinction risk assessment and better integrating evolutionary, functional and used diversity with conservation planning. Here, we report machine learning extinction risk predictions for 1,381 palm species (Arecaceae), a plant family of high socio-economic and ecological importance....

Community assembly processes on islands are often non‐random. The mechanisms behind non‐random assembly, however, are generally difficult to disentangle. Functional diversity in combination with a null model approach that accounts for differences in species richness among islands can be used to test for non‐random assembly processes, but has been a...

There are nearly 7,400 languages in the world and over 30% of these will no longer be spoken by the end of the century. So far, however, our understanding of whether language extinction may result in the loss of linguistically-unique knowledge remains limited. Here, we ask to what degree indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants is associated to ind...

David Gamman Frodin passed away unexpectedly at the West Middlesex Hospital (London) on 12 August 2019. He was un- aware that bladder cancer had taken hold and metastasized. The memorial service held at Arch 8 in Kew Bridge (London) on 5 September 2019 overflowed with his colleagues, neigh- bours and friends. The scientific community has lost a bri...

Never before has the biosphere, the thin layer of life we call home, been under such intensive and urgent threat. Deforestation rates have soared as we have cleared land to feed ever-more people, global emissions are disrupting the climate system, new pathogens threaten our crops and our health, illegal trade has eradicated entire plant populations...

Societal Impact Statement Biodiversity is essential to food security and nutrition locally and globally. By reviewing the global state of edible plants and highlighting key neglected and underutilized species (NUS), we attempt to unlock plant food resources and explore the role of fungi, which along with the wealth of traditional knowledge about th...

Societal Impact Statement Bioenergy is a major component of the global transition to renewable energy technologies. The plant and fungal kingdoms offer great potential but remain mostly untapped. Their increased use could contribute to the renewable energy transition and addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7 “Ensure access to...

Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi project provides assessments of our current knowledge of the diversity of plants and fungi on Earth, the global threats that they face, and the policies to safeguard them. Produced in conjunction with an international scientific symposium, Kew’s State of the World’s Plants and Fungi sets an important inte...

Bioenergy is a major component of the global transition to renewable energy technologies. The plant and fungal kingdoms offer great potential but remain mostly untapped. Their increased use could contribute to the renewable energy transition and addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7 “Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sus...

Plants are essential to human wellbeing, supporting important ecosystem services that are critical components of Natural Capital. They supply food, medicine, fibre, fuel and building materials, and provide a broad spectrum of benefits to society, offering vital solutions to some of the world’s major challenges, including bioenergy, human and animal...

With its large proportion of endemic taxa, complex geological past, and location at the confluence of the highly diverse Malesian and Australian floristic regions, Papuasia – the floristic region comprising the Bismarck Archipelago, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands – represents an ideal natural experiment in plant biogeography. However, scattere...

After the 2018 Peace treaty between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), many areas have become accessible to botanists. In a recent expedition to northeast Antioquia a new palm species in the genus Astrocaryum was discovered. Here, we provide a description of the species, photographs, distribution map and...

We conducted a bibliographic review of palm use in New Guinea to quantify palm-utilisation patterns across the region's habitats, countries, and indigenous groups, and to identify the most useful species. We reviewed 187 bibliographic references and 140 herbarium specimens, spanning the years 1885-2018. We found 1178 use-reports and 894 palm-uses f...

New Guinea is the most biologically and linguistically diverse tropical island on Earth, yet the potential impacts of climate change on its biocultural heritage remain unknown. Analyzing 2353 endemic plant species distributions, we find that 63% of species are expected to have smaller geographic ranges by 2070. As a result, ecoregions may have an a...

After the revision of New Guinean material of tree ferns (Cyatheaceae, Dicksoniaceae) stored at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, we describe the following ten species of scaly tree ferns (Cyatheaceae) as new to science: Alsophila calcicola, A. excelsior, A. indiscriminata, A. johnsii, A. nebulosa, A. novabritannica, A. parrisiae, A. sundueana and A....

We studied the floristic composition of palm communities and their relation with soil nutrients in two localities of the Chocó biogeographic region to undestand (1) How soil nutrients vary between the two localities? (2) What is the relationship between soil nutrients and palm floristic composition? (3) What are the most important nutrients that ex...

We present the first large-scale synthesis of indigenous knowledge (IK) on New Guinea’s useful plants based on a quantitative review of 488 references and 854 herbarium specimens. Specifically, we assessed (i) spatiotemporal trends in the documentation of IK, (ii) which are New Guinea’s most useful ecosystems and plant taxa, (iii) what use categori...

Key message: Permanent sampling plots (PSPs) are a powerful and reliable methodology to help our understanding of the diversity and dynamics of tropical forests. Based on the current inventory of PSPs in Indonesia, there is high potential to establish a long-term collaborative forest monitoring network. Whilst there are challenges to initiating suc...

Los bosques tropicales del Chocó biogeográfico presentan una de las mayores concentraciones de especies de plantas del mundo. Las palmas (Arecaceae) son una de las familias más importantes en las tierras bajas del Chocó, pero su ecología está poco estudiada. Investigamos la diversidad de comunidades de palmas en el Chocó y su relación con la precip...

The Manokwari Declaration is an unprecedented pledge by the governors of Indonesia's two New Guinea provinces to promote conservation and become SE Asia's new Costa Rica. This is an exciting, yet challenging endeavour that will require working on many fronts that transcend single disciplines. Because Indonesian New Guinea has the largest expanse of...

A new species of hairy tree fern (Dicksoniaceae - Cyatheales) is described and illustrated: Dicksonia utteridgei from stunted ridge forest in central New Guinea. The species is the only one in the genus with a combination of fully pinnate to bipinnate-pinnatifid pinnules and bristly spreading petiole hairs.

Se estudió el conocimiento y el uso de las palmas por parte de las comunidades indígenas Angostura, Curare y Yukuna, cercanas a la cabecera del corregimiento de La Pedrera, Amazonia colombiana. Entre junio y julio de 2010 se registró información etnobotánica mediante entrevistas estructuradas realizadas a 53 personas informantes de dichas comunidad...

A taxonomic revision is presented of the Hydriastele wendlandiana group, a well-defined species grouping within the Indo-Pacific palm genus Hydriastele that occurs in New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and northern Australia. We accept five species: Hydriastele kasesa, H. rheophytica, H. variabilis, H. wendlandiana and H. apetiolata sp. nov. and...

This study reappraised traditional knowledge (TK) about palms (Arecaceae) by the Chachi indigenous group in northwestern Ecuador, 30 years after the first study in 1985 on Chachi palm ethnobotany (Barfod and Balslev 1988). We wished to gain insight about which palm species the Chachi people use today, and how palm TK has changed among the Chachi si...

El Parque Nacional Natural Sierra Nevada del Cocuy (PNN Cocuy) exhibe la mayor extensión de glaciares en Colombia y elevaciones que alcanzan los 5330 m. La Sierra es una de las fuentes de agua más importantes del país, pues alberga numerosos lagos, ríos y quebradas. Aunque sabemos que el calentamiento global está causando el derretimiento de los gl...

Ethnopharmacological relevance: The tropical ulcer is a debilitating bacterial infection that is common in Papua New Guinea. Deploying healthcare infrastructure to remote and inaccessible rainforest locations is not practical, therefore local plants may be the best treatment option. Here we present an ethnobotanical survey of the tropical ulcer pl...

Esta obra reúne información etnobotánica sobre nueve especies de palmeras (Arecaceae) utilizadas por dos comunidades indígenas Chachi en Ecuador. Específicamente, este estudio reevaluó en 2015 el conocimiento de los Chachi sobre los usos de las palmeras treinta años después del primer estudio etnobotánico realizado en 1985 por Barfod y Balslev. Th...

The well-being of the global human population rests on provisioning services delivered by 12% of the Earth's ∼400,000 plant species1. Plant utilization by humans is influenced by species traits2, 3, 4, but it is not well understood which traits underpin different human needs5. Here, we focus on palms (Arecaceae), one of the most economically import...

1. Understanding the responses of individual plant species along different edaphic gradients is a key question in ecology, with implications to community assembly, functioning of forest ecosystems, niche theory, and conservation planning. In tropical rain forests, responses to soil nutrients have been described only for a handful of species. Even a...

The Chocó biodiversity hotspot is one of the most biodiverse and threatened regions on earth, yet the traditional knowledge (TK) of its inhabitants about biodiversity remains little studied. The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) aims to integrate different knowledge systems, including scientific and TK, to as...

The transmission of traditional knowledge (TK) depends largely on the ability of people to preserve and learn new knowledge. Different and opposing evidence about loss, persistence and generation of TK has been reported, but cross-cultural comparisons are notably missing. We interviewed 2050 informants at 25 localities in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru an...

Los primeros naturalistas europeos que visitaron la región tropical americana, en los siglos XVIII y XIX, ya nos llamaron la atención sobre la importancia que tenían las palmas en los bosques tropicales hú­ medos y los distintos usos que les daban las poblaciones locales. En efecto, en la actualidad se sabe que estas plantas ofre­ cen cientos de us...

We carried out a comprehensive literature review of the medicinal use of palms in northwestern South America and complemented it with a large number of field interviews. We investigated patterns of medicinal use across three ecoregions (Amazon, Andes, Chocó), four countries (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia), and three human groups (indigenous, mes...

Ce document décrit le protocole pour la collecte d’informations sur l’ethnobotanique des palmiers et les as- pects socio-économiques variables dans les communau- tés rurales intertropiques. Les étapes à suivre lors de la conduite des travaux de terrain sur une étude ethnobota- nique quantitative sont présentées chronologiquement comme suit: (1) la...

We explored the power of 14 socioeconomic factors for predicting differences in traditional knowledge about palms (Arecaceae) at the personal, household, and regional levels in 25 locations in the Amazon, Andes, and Chocó of northwestern South America. Using semistructured interviews, we gathered data on palm uses from 2050 informants in 53 communi...

Recent palm exploration in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia has revealed two species of Bactris that had been overlooked so far, having been mistaken for the sympatric and strikingly similar Bactris hondurensis. However, both species differ from Bactris hondurensis and from each other in many respects. They both grow side by side in Central Chocó,...

This Doctoral Thesis is the result of an interdisciplinary work between 2010-2014 to document and analyze the use patterns and traditional knowledge of palms (Arecaceae) in northwestern South America. The work is based on field data collected over 18 months in four countries (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia), three ecoregions (Amazon, Andes, Ch...

A main objective of ethnobotany is to document traditional knowledge about plants before it disappears. However, little is known about the coverage of past ethnobotanical studies and thus about how well the existing literature covers the overall traditional knowledge of different human groups. To bridge this gap, we investigated ethnobotanical data...

Link to download book: http://www.fp7-palms.org/images/FILES/products/books/Libro%20Palmeras%20utiles%20de%20Bolivia%202014.pdf

A taxonomic revision is presented of the new genus Heteroblemma (Dissochaeteae – Melastomataceae), formerly a section of Medinilla which occurs in Malesia and Vietnam with 14 species, 3 new, and 11 new combina- tions. Descriptions, illustrations, a key, and an index to collectors are provided.

En este capítulo se describen a grandes rasgos los patrones de uso de las 105 especies de palmas útiles en Ecuador. La información proviene de recopilaciones realizadas a partir de varios estudios etnobotánicos individuales además de datos sin publicar. Dentro de los usos tradicionales de las palmas, sus aplicaciones más importantes son como fuente...

This chapter describes a protocol for collecting information on palm ethnobotany and related socioeconomic variables in rural communities across the tropics. The steps to follow when conducting quantitative ethnobotanical fi eldwork are presented chronologically: 1) selection of study communities, 2) preparation of materials and permits, 3) plannin...

A thorough review concerning palm uses in tropical rainforests of north-western South America was carried out to understand patterns of palm use throughout ecoregions (Amazonia, Andes, Chocó), countries (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia), and among the different human groups (indigenous, mestizos, afroamericans, colonos) that occur there. A total o...

A new species of Medinilla (Melastomataceae) from Celebes, Indonesia, is described. It is a terrestrial shrub or treelet with specialised leafless inflorescence-bearing, many-branched branches at the base of the boles. It is clearly distinct in habit, branch–, leaf–, flower–, and fruit morphology from the few other species that are reported to have...

Resumen En este artículo se presenta el protocolo para la obtención de información etnobotánica y variables socioeconómicas de palmeras en las comunidades que hacen uso de ellas en los bosques tropicales. Se presentan cronológicamente los diferentes pasos a seguir: 1) selección de las comunidades de estudio, 2) preparación de materiales de trabajo...

The main goal of this study is to characterize the high Andean rain forest vegetation of the Encenillo Biological Reserve and to establish a syntaxonomic scheme or classification based on analysis of the physiognomy, floristic composition and spatial distribution of the different Weinmannia tomentosa forests.