Helping to protect both plants and people in the developing world is the focus of research by a Guelph botanist that attracted funding late last year from the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute.
Prof. Steven Newmaster, Integrative Biology, and his research team will use the three-year $80,000 grant from the institute to continue their studies of indigenous knowledge and cultural uses of plants in southern India.
The group will mix social science and botany in studies of plants used by indigenous people. Newmaster says he hopes to help native communities survive and prevent loss of genetic resources.
“We’re helping them protect what they see as biodiversity rather than what we see as biodiversity. We are interested in biodiversity on a local scale, not just western but also other cultures.”
He will work with indigenous communities through the Centre for Biocultural Diversity based in Chennai in Tamil Nadu state. The communities number perhaps 3,000 people each.
Newmaster wants to look more closely at differences between men and women and between people of different ages when it comes to plant lore.
“Women have a different knowledge body about biodiversity than men do,” he says.
Typically, men look at plants for use in food, shelter or landscape, whereas women consider classification for food and medicine. The project will involve training of indigenous people, especially girls.
Newmaster is also struck by how much younger Indians, including children, know about plants, particularly compared with Canadian youngsters. “They have a concept of biodiversity at quite a young age.”
Besides preserving indigenous knowledge, the team hopes to help people reclaim areas lost to other uses, including — paradoxically — nature preserves established by governments.
“These people want to be part of the landscape,” says Newmaster.
The Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute promotes joint activities intended to achieve gender equality and reduce poverty.
“This award is a kind of honour to the tribal people who are the source of traditional knowledge gained over thousands of years,” says research associate Subramanyam Ragupathy, who is working in India this winter.
Newmaster and his lab partners study ethnobotany, or how people employ local plants for food, shelter, medicine and other uses. They’ve worked with researchers in Peru and Costa Rica as well as India, and Newmaster hopes to begin another plant biodiversity project in Bhutan in 2011.
Since the fall, PhD student Kevan Berg has been working in Taiwan at Providence University, home base of his ecologist co-adviser, Yih-Ren Lin. Berg studies indigenous knowledge and classification of habitats, including how local people and western scientists view the ecology of an area.
He will work with tribal residents of Smangus, one of the most remote villages in the country. Describing the site in a recent email, Berg wrote: “Three to four hours off the main highways, high up narrow, winding and precipitous mountain roads — and there it sits perched in the clouds high on the edge of bamboo- and pine-covered mountains.”
Because of the remoteness of Smangus and an ancient cypress forest nearby, ecotourism has become the village’s mainstay. Analyzing habitats could help improve that business, says Berg. For example, “habitat signs constructed along the paths would inform tourists of each particular ecosystem they’re walking through.”
Studying plants and cultures in Asia also holds an allure for Newmaster’s daughter Annabel, a third-year anthropology student who identifies and prepares plant specimens for U of G’s herbarium. From an early age, she and her sister spent summers travelling around Canada and collecting plants with their dad.
For the summer, Annabel has a job as a naturalist at Lake Superior Provincial Park, but she hopes to visit Asia to learn about traditional knowledge of plants.
“That would be amazing,” she says.