University Place  Joe Meisel Conserving Tropical Orchids  October 23, 2013 UP935   cc >> Welcome, everybody, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year, and it's another chance for you to participate in the life of the university and to share in the discovery here at at your public land-grant research university. Tonight, it's my pleasure to be able to introduce to you Joe Meisel. He grew up in Chicago, in Lincoln Park, which is going to be important when you hear what he does for a living. He went to the University of Virginia for an undergrad, got his Master's at Florida, and then got a PhD here in zoology, and I think he's going to tell us about the irony of getting a zoology degree and now he works on orchids and other things. And that was in 2004. He's currently vice president for the Ceiba Foundation for Tropical Conservation. 

He gets to spend about half the year in Ecuador every year. And that's a source of envy for those of us who like plants and warm things. The ice fishing is not so good in Ecuador. But one of the things that is pretty amazing is the tropical forests, and Joe particularly is going to talk about the work that he does in conserving tropical orchids. Please join me in welcoming Joe Meisel to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]  >> Well, thanks, Tom, for the fine introduction. Thanks, everybody, for coming this evening, and thanks to the University of Wisconsin and Wednesday Nite at the Lab for inviting me. As Tom mentioned, I work for the Ceiba Foundation for Tropical Conservation. We're a nonprofit group based here in Madison with project in Ecuador focusing on protection of tropical habitats. Some of our early projects and ones that we're still really dedicated to today have to do with conservation of orchid habitats. 

So I'll largely talk about that today. We're a small organization. We're based here in Madison. We get all of our support from donors and from grants and from fund raising events. We have an event coming up in November you can read about. And as a smaller organization, we've had to come up with approaches to making conservation efficient for us. So I think I'd like to talk today about some of the ways in which we try to get sort of the most bang for our donated buck, as it were, in conserving orchid habitat in South America. Before we get started, let's show some pretty pictures of orchids. These are the things that we're conserving in large part and are things that are receding ever more quickly in our minds as the snow starts to fall. This is Acineta superba, an orchid from Ecuador. 

Many of these were shot in the field, some in a greenhouse in Ecuador. This is Epidendrum lehmannii. There's about 35,000 species of orchids in the world. Nobody really knows how many. Maybe a hundred new ones are discovered every year or discovered to be different enough to be called a separate species. Ecuador probably has around 4,000 or 4,200 species. So it's one of the most orchid-rich countries in the world. It probably will be surpassed by Columbia in total diversity, but Columbia is not as well explored for the time being. This is Restrepia. I call this one the shoehorn orchid because it looks like a shoehorn. 

They're really pretty. They attract bugs with these little scent glands that are in those little filaments. Tom mentioned that I'm not originally a botanist, which is very true. I came into all of this from a background of zoology, studying birds and insects, and through Ceiba Foundation got very interested in trying to do habitat conservation projects, as I said, in Ecuador, and early on we got very interested in the idea of protecting habitat that was focused around orchids. There are a number of people that belong to orchid societies across America, some of them are in the audience tonight, and those societies are increasingly supportive of not just the joy of looking at orchids, collecting them, having them in greenhouses, hybridizing them, swapping them, all of which are really fun, wonderful pursuits, but also interested in supporting the places that those orchids are found for going to view them in the wild, for maintaining original native populations, and many other reasons. So I and my colleagues at the Ceiba Foundation got very interested in using orchids as kind of a flagship species, as it were, or flagship family of plants in this case, upon which kind of piggybacked conservation of habitat in Ecuador. So, Brachtia andina, this is shot just a couple years ago in a reserve that I'll talk about momentarily. Anguloa cloweii, a very cupped orchid. A very big variety if you've never looked at a lot of orchids in the family. Okay, so, very briefly I'm going to talk a little tiny bit about the threats to orchid habitat. 

These are largely similar to what you might already know about threats to tropical habitat in general. So I'll pass kind of quickly over this. And then I'm going to talk about three ways in which Ceiba is contributing to protection of orchid habitat in South America. An orchid reserve that we've formed, a piece of research that we're in the process of conducting right now that prioritizes areas for orchid protection, and a new set of conservation projects that we have that are located more in the lowlands in the coast. So we'll kind of work our way through those three topics. For the time being, remember that world tropical forests are being lost at about a rate of 1% a year, a little less in some years. It's fairly accelerated in Brazil in 2012, so I expect that number will go up a little. Montane forests, or mountainous forest, forest in the mountains, what I'm going to talk about largely today, that's actually being lost at a greater rate. And the second reserve that I'm going to talk about later is located in what we call a dry forest. It's a seasonal forest. 

Trees lose their leaves during an extended dry season that's happening right now. That forest type throughout Latin America is probably the most heavily threatened habitat type. Only about 2% or 1.5% of dry tropical forest remains in Central and South America. The causes of deforestation are usually cutting for cattle. Initially, that's one of the cheapest land uses to convert forests to. It accounts for maybe two-thirds of the clearing down in the Amazon. Increasingly, we're seeing a lot of land being converted over to oil palm, to sugarcane, in places like Brazil particularly, to soybeans, and other crops that serve as a growing demand for biofuel. Biofuels is a complicated enough topic unto itself, but certainly in terms of a driver for losing forest on landscapes, we see that happening quite a bit in Ecuador as well as other countries. Timber and charcoal, charcoaling, especially, is a very common cause of forest loss. In higher elevations, people literally cut down trees. 

They kind of bury the pile so that it cooks without a lot of oxygen. It makes charcoal. If you're used to buying charcoal as the little square briquettes, those are largely artificially. But charcoal looks like what the fire looks like at the end of the night. And it's very common, especially in less well to do parts of the tropics where people heat their homes or do cooking using these kinds of fuels. I do want to underscore, however, that largely the driver for all of this is poverty. And it's really important, the message that we give out students all the time, it's really important to remember that the person who is in a forest with a chain saw or an ax and cutting a tree down is probably doing so because he needs the money to get medicine for his wife or to put clothes on his son's back or to send his daughter to college. So these kinds of individual attacks on forests are often driven by lack of other economic alternatives, and that's something that Ceiba, as an organization, we've tried to dedicate ourselves to as a longer term way of alleviating this problem. Historically, there have been other ways that orchids were lost. One of the classic ones is just literally taking orchids from forests. 

Before orchids were able to be produces sustainably, that only really started in about the 1930s, 1940s, pretty much all orchids that were sold had to be taken from wild places, brought typically to greenhouses in Europe and the United States, and grown vegetatively there. This led to a whole cadre of very colorful, sort of Indiana Jones-esque individuals that scoured the world, especially in the 1820s to about the turn of the 20th century. But that period around 1850s was kind of the key period for these folks, and they literally covered almost every square foot of Central and South America in search of orchids. They would box them up in huge numbers because only 1% or 10% of the orchids would survive these long sea voyages back to Europe. So they consequently had to collect just enormous quantities of orchids. One of the famous collectors was a guy named Benedikt Roezl. He was a Czechoslovakian national but collecting for greenhouses in England. And he, by his own accounts, shipped something like eight tons of orchids back from Venezuela and Panama. This, remember, is done by hand collecting, carrying them on the backs of people to the edge of the forest, mules to the river, canoes, this is not a simple operation of just forklifting them into a truck. And to do so, they would literally just cut down trees. 

Maybe 4,000 trees for every 10,000 orchids that were collected. Make huge clearings in the forest because the orchids are way up there and how else are you going to get them? So we'll just knock them down. It's often said that one tree was lost of every three scraps of Odontoglossum to reach Europe. Odontoglossum, a very attractive orchid that was a big seller. More in the modern day, you still see this a lot when you're driving by rural areas in Latin America. There are people that perch by the side of the road with sticks carrying parrots or sometimes monkeys in cages or orchids if you happen to be in mountainous areas, and they've just illegally, in most cases, extracted them from the wild and sell them to passersby. Maybe, if you're interested in orchids, you're familiar with a story about this big orchid to the right called Phragmipedium kovachii. It's a very large slipper orchid, a pouch orchid. I'm not supposed to walk over there, I suppose. I'm not supposed to do that either. 

I've been getting a lot of instructions. So, this thing here, this is a pouch, a bowl into which pollinating bugs will fall into, and in climbing out, they pick up the pollen of the orchid. And it's extremely large and extremely colorful for South American Phragmipedium. In fact, there's nothing like this in the world. And when it was first discovered in about 2001, it launched this firestorm because it was smuggled into the United States. It was illegally described. It was a pretty exciting story. Part of Susan Orlean's book Orchid Thief kind of focuses on this. Anyway, by 2003, three of the main localities in which it was discovered were completely exhausted. They had been totally cleared of every scrap of orchid material there. 

Luckily, there were additional sites that had been found, but nobody knew about them or were told about them, and by about 2005 they started a process of sustainable cultivation of orchids which goes on to this day. You can buy a Phrag kovachii now from sellers in Ecuador, in Peru, and it's perfectly legal. So that has largely marked or described the arc of orchids moving from this kind of wanton collection to more sustainable approaches growing them in greenhouses. Okay, a little science for everybody. So, orchids are extremely diverse in montane forests, or mountainous tropical forests. So this raises the question of why, and one of the reasons is because the climate is ideal. For those of you who have tried to grow orchids, especially cooler climate orchids, they need a lot of moisture. They need some air flow. They don't take very high levels of light. They need kind of cooler climates. 

And this is because that's the climate that they find in montane forests. So, why? Why are mountains kind of cold? If you've taken basic climatology, then you would know these things, and maybe they're well know to people. But basically you have a process by which air cools as it goes up in elevation. If you've ever traveled up in elevation, that's a little hard to do in this state per se, but if you've climbed up in the Rockies or things like that, obviously it gets colder as you go higher. And the rate at which it does that is called the adiabatic lapse rate, the rate at which air gets cooler. And it's a pretty standard six degrees Celsius for every thousands meters that you go up. So air gets cooler as you get higher. Now, orography, which is a fancy word for topography, the shape of the land, will cause air to get lifted as it is blown. So this is showing, the top right diagram, this is showing air being blown from left to right, and as it strikes the mountain, it gets pushed up. And as it gets pushed up, it turns to colder air in accordance with this adiabatic lapse rate. 

That air might be only, say, half saturated with water. It's flowing over an ocean, or more commonly in South America it's floating over the Amazon which releases a huge amount of water. About 70% of all the water that rains in the Andes actually originates from the Amazon Forest itself. It's exhaled by the forest, so that air comes and it strikes these mountains, and it may be partially saturated with water, but as it pushes up the mountains, it cools until clouds form, and then it rains. So you see these very distinct cloud layers in pictures. This is from the Ecuadorian Andes here in the bottom left, or different formations in other mountainous areas. So all this explains why at certain elevations in mountainous forests, you have pretty continuous cloud cover and all the things that that brings. Cool temperatures, reduced light, kind of diffused light, and very high humidity. Okay, now, you have this, you combine that climate with the fact that these mountains are extremely rugged. So they go from a peak up here or a ridge line, they drop down to a valley that's behind, and then there's this, this is really hard to do, then there's this ridge line here. 

So the mountains are kind of coming down and up and down, and populations that are on two isolated ridge lines are pretty separated from one another. Their pollinators aren't able to get back and forth. And populations that are down in two valleys that are separated by a ridge also are isolated. So the very famous story, of course, is Galapagos and Darwin's finches and how the separation between islands allowed for these finches to evolve in their own sort of directions until they became visible as distinct species. That largely occurs in mountains as well. Even though they're not surrounded by ocean, they're still surrounded by areas that are inhospitable to the plants of a certain elevation. So you have this broken landscape in which populations are really separated, and that leads to a lot of species because each of these islands kind of generates its own species of orchids and because each species only occurs in one relatively restricted area, there's a high level of what we call endemism. An endemic plant is a plant that only occurs in one area and not in other locations. So as you move from place to place in the high mountains, you find a lot of species and many of them are found only in those locations. Just some examples, some better data is actually from mammals but the numbers are fairly similar. 

If you travel around the Amazon, you have to go great distances to encounter a new species of mammal, but if you go relatively small distances in the Andes, you can start finding new species. So that level of endemism is about 10 times in the Andes what you would find in the Amazon. And the same thing is true, largely, of things like frogs, of birds, and also of orchids. So these montane areas become great homes for things like Pleurothallis, which is the central picture, Stelis, the picture on the left, Lepanthes, Dracula. These are all different genera or groups of orchids that do well in these cooler, high elevations, and they're really, really diverse. Pleurothallis, in the middle, that alone has something like 1600 species. That's equivalent to all the species of birds in Ecuador, for example. That's just one little genus of plants. Again, the mountains we see the same kinds of threats, cattle, logging, charcoaling, as I said, is pretty abundant there, and increasingly climate change, that Tom alluded to earlier, is causing problems in that it pushes an elevational band of a particular climate uphill. If it's warm here, sorry, if it's a cool band of climate, as the planetary climate starts to heat up you have to go higher up the mountain to find that same cool climate. 

And this has been shown for birds and a few other species of plants to be shifting natural ranges. So put all those factors together and you get a forest that looks like this. This is actually taken inside the El Pahuma Reserve that I'm going to talk about in a minute, one of Ceiba's projects. But notice that you have this very diffuse light, you have so much humidity that there's moss growing over every surface. It's completely coated in moss. If somebody were to say, oh, let's go look at the bark of this tree, you would never find it because it's just covered in moss, this big, giant sponge. It collects all this moisture, and orchids grow beautifully in that kind of environment. There's a lot of Bromeliads in this picture. This like this guy here and these guys. There's are Bromeliads, relatives of the pineapple if you know that one. 

And really, really rich in orchids. So that place is called the El Pahuma Orchid Reserve, and I mentioned at the outset that I'm going to talk today about three different ways that Ceiba is trying to improve our efficiency of doing conservation, and one of them we implemented here at the El Pahuma Reserve. We believe that in the Andes Mountains small private reserves do an excellent job of conserving portions of the flora and fauna. This is because of those diversity and endemic numbers that I talked about earlier. One particular location is quite likely to contain plants and animals that don't occur anywhere else. They also often have very small ranges. So relatively small reserves can protect the entire population of some of these species. This is quite different from the conservation approach that you have to take for lowland areas like the Amazon where very large reserves are required. If you're a jaguar, you have maybe, well first of all, great for you, and you need maybe a hundred square kilometers of land to be able to find enough prey. So that's an enormous area just for one individual. 

So we set about establishing a small private reserve called the El Pahuma Orchid Reserve. We work closely with a local family. I'll come back to this in a second. We work closely with a local family that owns a piece of land just outside of Quito, and they were very interested in obtaining support or assistance in setting up their property to be a reserve that ecotourists could come to as a destination, and they had this idea that orchids would be a good driver for this, that people would come to see orchids. So we had just, at that time, actually I was in the middle of a PhD project here at UW and had started the foundation, and we were looking for projects and so ran into these people and sort of, oh, we have land and we want a conservation project. And we said, well, we have a foundation and we want a conservation project. So it was a very fortuitous meeting. Briefly, a background about Ceiba. We were founded in 1997, the same year that we met the family that owns the orchid reserve. We have a small staff both here and in Ecuador. 

Most of our operation and staff are in Ecuador. As I said before, we work in the Andes and on the Pacific coast. And you can read our mission. So we try to do habitat conservation through a combination of educational programs through scientific research and through direct protection of land. Our name is taken from the Ceiba tree, a couple of pictures of it on the right. It's a very large rainforest tree that has this arching canopy. It's home to and protector of a lot of species, and so it seemed a fitting name for a conservation organization. So we met the Lima family, pictured in the upper left hand corner, that's Efraim Lima in the dark vest and the black cap. He's the landowner of approximately 600 hectares or 1500 acres of cloud forest that runs from about 6,000 to 8,000 feet of elevation. So this is prime cloud habitat. 

It would fall right in the middle of that band of clouds that I showed in earlier photographs. And they have at that reserve something like 300 species of orchids. Probably if a very thorough study were done, it would get closer to 350 or 375. And we, in working with this family it's always been our policy not to purchase land for our own conservation projects, but rather to work with local landowners, helping them hold the land in their own legal possession, and help them to operate it as a reserve. So that's the agreement that we came to with this family. We signed a conservation easement with them, which is a pretty well known vehicle for conservation here in the United States. The Nature Conservancy and many other groups do this. It's a conservation stipulation that's attached to the title of the land so it moves with the land regardless of the owner. But in our case, it was the first ever true conservation easement in South America that was signed between Ceiba and the Lima family. Basically, the easement stipulates that they protect the forest, and in exchange we provide some infrastructure development. 

So we built a nature center, pictured on the bottom left, some educational displays. We installed trails and signage throughout the reserve and also a botanical garden, and we helped the family with a number of training programs in how to care for orchids, in being naturalist guides, in leading groups and all these kind of diverse skills that are necessary. And the projection was to fund the reserve and support this family through a stream of ecotourists visiting the reserve. And that's basically what has happened. They now have about half the visitors at the reserve are Ecuadorian nationals and about half are international. So the international ones, not surprising, Ecuador is a popular country, a lot of people go for Galapagos tours and for the Amazon, and they often will squeeze in a trip to cloud forest or orchids on the side. The national visitors we're extremely pleased with. These were a lot of school groups, college students, and graduate students, Ecuadorians that are doing thesis projects. We have other kinds of tour groups that come from the big cities and go out to the mountainous landscape. And so it's a nice opportunity for the reserve to showcase Ecuador's diversity, both for national and international visitors. 

Okay, so where are we? This is South America. The equator passes just about through the word Ecuador there, and it's not incredibly bright and clear but this is basically the country of Ecuador with clouds marking the Andes running up and down the middle. A map of Ecuador, a country about the size of Colorado, shows the equator passing through the top there. Just under the equator, about the middle, is the capitol of Quito. The other major city is down in the lower left, Guayaquil, the large port city. Quito is up in this high elevation and fairly close to it is the El Pahuma Orchid Reserve. So this is located in the area, where's my little mouse, right over about here, to the north and west of Quito. It's only about a 40 minute drive outside of town. So it's very suited for day visits. Satellite imagery, this is basically a schematic of El Pahuma. 

So, to the north you have one river, which is the Rio Nono, and that whiter line is actually the highway that runs through there. And then in the middle there's a ridge line, so that's the part that gets up to about 8,000 feet, and then the reserve then comes back downhill on the other side to the Alambi River. So that forms this piece of a mountainous crest. And, like I said, it covers about 6,000 feet of elevation, up to about 8,000 feet. So the view from above is something like this. Pretty continuously forested landscape. Way off in the distance in the upper right you can see some cleared areas that are a good bit away. But this was taken from kind of a lookout, so we're above the canopy a little bit. And it's continuous, virtually, primary forest with some high grading down in the '70s. When they built that highway through, the guys from the highway crew just snuck in and took out mahogany here and there, but largely it's a pristine forest. 

Some of the really fabulous species of not just orchids include this Chondrorhyncha orchid. Maxillaria lehmannii, one that's real famous for the province, very beautiful large flower, almost the size of your hand. Another very large flower, Sobralia. Some of these actually smell strongly of vanilla, which is an orchid. It's not this one, but vanilla's a climbing vine. It gets about 40 feet tall, and that's where we get the flavor from. Cyrtochilum, this is a long, twining inflorescence. It extends maybe 50-60 feet through the forest if it's got enough places to hang on to. Odontoglossum, I just covered, found this pair blooming last year up at about 7,000 feet of elevation. Really pretty. 

About the size of a saucer. Elleanthus, a terrestrial orchid. Not all orchids grow up in trees. This one grows from the ground. Masdevallia, a very small tubular, trumpet-shaped orchid from that cool growing group. And El Pahuma is real famous for Draculas, not named for the blood sucker, but rather Italian for little dragon. And the face of these orchids is thought to look a little bit like a dragon. In Spanish they call them cara de mono, which means the monkey face, because it looks a fair bit like a monkey. They're really, really interesting orchids. They could be a talk unto themselves. 

The lip actually mimics a mushroom. It looks kind of like a mushroom. And if you look real closely, it has little gills like the underside of a mushroom cap. It smells a little bit musty like a mushroom, and it's pollinated by little fungus gnats that typically do reproductive displays and lay eggs on top of mushrooms but they visit the Dracula and then pollinate them and that's how they get pollinated. In fact, if you plant them near mushrooms, those Dracula have higher rates of pollination than orchids that are further away from mushrooms. So they do a pretty good job. They're really beautiful. Another Dracula species much more strongly marked, but again with that kind of white sort of fungal looking lip. These mountainous forests are home to a lot of other diversities. Like I said, I came out of a background of birds, so Andean Cock-of-the-rock is a relative of the quetzal and a very, very pretty bird. 

There's a fair diversity of frogs and reptiles, so Anolis lizards, this Pristimantis frog. In fact, we had a student that came to El Pahuma. He spent four weeks doing an internship there, hiking out into the forest from about 2:00 AM from 5:00 AM every night, and he found four species of that genus, the Pristimantis. These are in the process of being named right now. They all look fairly similar, but they're distinct enough, in their calls particularly, that they're different species. We have a blue toucan in El Pahuma. So a blue-breasted what's called a plate-bill mountain toucan. Very large bird, about this big. A fruit eater commonly seen up there, but not seen very many other places. It's quite common there but really hard or absent in other parts of Ecuador. 

So, again, that endemism, these small kind of ranges that apply to birds as well as orchids. That's about life size. No, just kidding. [LAUGHTER] You could carry your luggage with one of those. It's about this big. That's a Hercules beetle, staghorn beetle. They've got a lot of different names. Spectacled bear, these are in Vilas Zoo actually, or at least they used to be last time I was there. Sometimes called the Andean bear. These are largely vegetarian bears that really thrive in these mountainous habitats. 

They eat Bromeliads, the things that I was pointing out before, and also a bunch of fruits. And sometimes they scrape the bark of trees. We were just finding some of that on a particular kind of tree. They took all the bark off and ate all the inside of the bark. You might have read some news reports recently about the olinguito, which is the new mammal species that was discovered, if finding that a skeleton in a museum looks different from another skeleton in a museum means discovering, but still, they're like an actual separate species. This is actually a closer relative to the raccoon, but if anything, it looks kind of like a monkey in a tree. They're nocturnal. They're totally arboreal, so they scamper around in the treetops. They're fruit eaters. We've seen what have almost certainly been olinguitos in El Pahuma, but never got a good enough look to be able to know. 

I had thought at the time they were olingos, but those things are actually in this same piece of forest that we're located in. Okay, so in Pahuma, as I said, we tried to help them to set up a reserve that would finance the family themselves, they were living, literally, in a dirt floor, plastic, tar paper roof shack when we first met them, and try to provide them with some income from this beautiful forest that they have. They now have something like 1,000-1500 visitors per month. As I said, it's a mix of nationals and internationals. It provides incomes for, depending on the year, four to five of the members of the family. They opened a restaurant that provides some additional income and are increasingly adept at hustling tours, at getting tour companies to come there, at bringing school groups there and leading them around. They do a really great job. Let's see, we're bringing kind of this new generation up. Actually, the grandson of Efraim Lima, who turned 22 last year, is now their reserve manager because there was all kinds of family fighting between Efraim and his son, so they said better to let the grandson run it and we'll just kind of forget about all these problems. And also, I think something that's been really encouraging to us is that El Pahuma has kind of served as this model of a conservation project for other landowners in the region. 

There's been a number of kind of copycat projects that have cropped up in which somebody has a waterfall that they'll take you to or somebody has a cave that's really interesting or a really great looking overlook or things like this. So I think it's terrific. What it's showing is that there's enough demand of people driving down this road that it can support a number of different opportunities just like or similar to Pahuma. And they've increasingly figured out that diversification of their offerings is the best thing to do rather than everybody giving the same exact kind of tour. So now if you would call up Rene Lima, that's Efraim's son, he's the head guide at the reserve, and say, okay, I have a group of 15 Germans and we want to do a forest visit, so what can we do? And they would say, well, we can go do orchids and we can go to an archeological dig and we can go look at a waterfall or we could go do trout fishing at the sport fishing place. And they'll say, okay, well, we want A, C, and F, and they put a tour together and they go visit those. And maybe the Belgian tour bus, the next one, they want to go somewhere else. So they diversify and everybody kind of gets a little piece of the pie all the time. A little bit about Pahuma's future. We are consistently working to improve the botanical garden. 

There's a couple pictures in the upper right-hand corner. We're collecting plants all the time from the forest and hanging them in the garden. So there's one very concentrated place with flowers to be able to enjoy as a visiting public without hiking all over the forest. We're constantly providing training programs for our staff members and other people that work at the reserve to learn how to better care for orchids, and we always take volunteers in those efforts. So, as a quick plug, if anybody is interested in going to Ecuador and getting a little bit of dirt under you fingernails and discovering a species of a frog, then come on down. Additionally, an opportunity has kind of fallen into our laps to potentially purchase the piece of land that is immediately adjacent to El Pahuma. I mentioned before that Ceiba has not traditionally engaged in land purchase. We find that leaving it in local ownership is actually more effective, but in this case we're paired with the Quito Orchid Association, and I think that what we're going to try to do is purchase this piece of land which lays right alongside of Pahuma in that sort of long parcel on the left there. Luis Ravelo is the brother of Efraim and is the owner of that land but never really lived there and is keen to sell the property now, which is in virtually identical condition to El Pahuma. So the idea would be to try to purchase this land, land prices are considerably cheaper there than they are here, about $200 an acre, and then fuse it with the El Pahuma Reserve for single management. 

They'll have guards that run around all of the perimeter and virtually double the size of the reserve I think it raises it by about 65% in size. So that's kind of on our future in Pahuma and something I'll be working on as soon as I go back to Ecuador, which will be in early January. Okay, normally I would take questions at this point, but I'm just going to kind of keep moving along for purposes of the broadcast. And then, of course, if you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them at length after the talk. Okay, so what I've just finished is a discussion of a small, private reserve, which is one of the techniques that we're trying to use to leverage the most we can out of donations here in the states to do orchid habitat conservation. Another way to do this is with the application of scientific research, trying to figure out mathematically or quantitatively what is the most effective way to protect orchid habitat at a national level in Ecuador rather than just these opportunities that kind of fell to us. So, starting a couple of years ago in conjunction with the Orchid Conservation Alliance in San Diego, I started a GIS project, geographic information systems, mapping project to look at the distribution of orchids in Ecuador and set priorities for their conservation. Okay, some terminology at the introduction, a gap analysis is a thing that's actually been mandated in the United States for a variety of different kinds of protection systems. Essentially, if you look at this graphic on the left, you have a set of vegetation types. So let's just say we have marsh where the stream is and prairie out in the open. 

You take a map layer that shows the distribution of your species of interest. So, in this particular graphic, say, we have some butterflies in the lower left and some rabbits in the middle right, which a lot of people seem to think look like ducks. [LAUGHTER] This is a very Rorschach, how many people think those look like ducks? How many people say rabbits? I always see rabbits and everybody says, are you talking about the ducks in the slide? [LAUGHTER] These are rabbits. They're this way, sort of going from left to right. So, anyway, those are rab-ducks. I don't know what they are. So anyway, you have these extreme obscure rabbit ducks that are living in the prairie, and then you take a third map layer in which you have the outline of protected areas. Those could be national parks, private protected lands, national forests. It depends on the kinds of protection vehicles the country has. And you overlay them all to see how good a job does your protected area system do at conserving habitat for these critical species. 

So in the case of the sparrows or the songbirds in the upper left, they're pretty well protected. The lower left shows those butterflies and their habitat to be completely outside of those two blocks of protected areas. So that's what we mean by a gap. Are there gaps in protected area systems into which endangered species fall. Okay? This was done on an international level by Conservation International to create what are called the biodiversity or international biodiversity hotspots. They did a survey of the entire globe. They were particularly looking at percent of endemic species, how many unique things are found there, and deforestation rates, an estimate of risk, how much risk is that habitat under, and they identified, it's a shifting number, but about 40 different places around the world that are these key biodiversity hotspots. One of which is in western Ecuador and one of which is up in the mountains of Ecuador. So these diagrams up here sort of showing that northwestern coast of South America. So that's what a gap analysis is, and I set out to do a gap analysis for the orchids of Ecuador. 

So we started off by going to the area, the places that they collect samples of plants. We had about 25,000 records of orchids, so actual collections that people had taken in, identified, and registered where they were. Some of those were like, okay, you go to Pasto and then you walk 17 miles sort of to the left, which really doesn't help you all that much, and they certainly didn't have Google Earth or GPS units. So we've kind of whittled those 25,000 records down to about 7,000 where we had pretty good coordinates and plotted them on all of the country of Ecuador. So we have a lot of these points are actually laying on top of each other so you don't see them as 7,000, but there's about 7,100 and some odd points. We did, however, find a number of areas, one of them is marked there, that were unsampled. People did not go there, at least reportedly, to collect orchids. So it doesn't mean that there are no orchids there, just that nobody looked for them. So we have to somehow take this set of data and use it to predict what the diversity of orchids might be in those places that were unsampled. And to do that, we match up the orchids that we do know, for which we know the localities, and we compare them to elevation, to climate, and other factors that are very commonly controllers of biodiversity. 

So in this case, I broke the country into a grid of 10 by 10 kilometer cells. In the lower left, in each of those cells we count up the number of different species of orchids that were found in well sampled areas, areas with more than 10 records. So all of those areas are kind of occupied. The darker they are, the more diverse they are. And we take those areas that were well sampled and we create a model or a prediction, it's pretty straightforward, just comparing or implementing the effects of elevation, there's more orchids at relatively high elevations but not super high where it gets really cold, and with precipitation seasonality. So the left-hand side of the country of that right image is brown because that's very seasonal dry forest. You get a lot of months of the year where there's no rain. And to the right-hand side, all that blue is basically aseasonal. You have rainfall pretty much steady throughout the year. So we combine all three of those, or those two factors, and use them to predict where orchids are going to be located, and we produce this false color image that looks like this. 

The reds and oranges are high predicted diversity, and you can see how that falls along a pair of areas, whoops, a pair of areas that runs along the eastern flanks of the Andes all the way down the country. And then another area running down the northwestern flank of the Andes. And in the middle, they actually get too high. The mountains get up over 10,000 or 8,000 feet. It gets cold, you're out of the tree line, and orchids are not as diverse. So you have those peak diversity areas in those moderate slopes where there's enough moisture. It doesn't occur that much down on these slopes on the southwest because it's much drier down here in this western area. And then you have areas that are either too low, too dry, or too high in altitude to support high levels of diversity. Okay, so we take this map and then we subtract from it the areas that aren't habitat anymore. We have satellite images that tell us where there is and is not forest. 

So that's all the white areas in here marked deforested. And we also overlay the protected area, the maps of the current system of national protected areas in Ecuador. So all the blue outlines are actual national parks. That's Yasuni National Park in the northeast. That's been gaining a lot of notoriety from this kind of collapsed ITT protection project. And these purple areas are private reserves, but they're federally recognized private reserves. They conform to this series of requirements, and they're a pretty good component of the protected system. So first of all, at first it does a pretty good job. I'm just going to kind of go back and forth a couple of times. You see that those red areas are pretty well covered by a lot of these national parks, especially on the eastern side. 

However, there are some key areas around the edges of Cotacachi Cayapas National Park, around some of these edges here, and then a few more in the south that are uncovered that fall into this category of a gap in where we believe there is high diversity of orchids but is an area that falls outside of current protection. So if I strip away some of that diversity, we come up with 40, actually 39 different sites, many of which are adjacent to but a few of them are separated from current protected areas. And those are all of our kind of peak priority sites for orchid conservation. The research goes a little bit further to rank those sites based on the threats that they face. So we look at things like population growth rate, rate of road infrastructure construction, direct measurements of rates of deforestation, and we rank all of these based on those risk factors to create a map of the most high priority of orchid sites. Excuse me. Okay, so that map I'm now distributing to expert friends of ours throughout the country of Ecuador to comment on whether they've been there, if they know that there's a reserve in that location, has it already been deforested, or any other information that will be helpful. And along the way, we are going to publish this in an international journal, and the idea is that it will serve as an organizing document, kind of an unbiased piece of research that identifies the key areas for orchid protection and will allow people that are going to establish a new reserve to say, okay, we're up here on the border of Cotacachi Cayapas National Park, we want to establish a new reserve and we fall right in the middle of this priority area that came out of this unbiased research. So that's the basic idea, and we're hoping to publish it before the end of this year. Excuse me. 

Sometimes I get to talking so much that I don't take time to breathe or swallow, so I'll have to work on this. Okay, so that's kind of the orchid conservation. The idea behind this whole process is to, conservation money is very limited, and there certainly are lots of opportunities for finding places that are worthy of conservation. So, trying to figure out the most efficient way to achieve that conservation is what this is all about.  On a snowy day like today, this is kind of a welcomed sight. It's probably 82. There's a little bit of a breeze. The sea is kind of crashing. So we're sort of, obviously, switching gears quite a bit here in altitudes. Ceiba's original habitat protection project was the El Pahuma Reserve up at altitude, but in recent years we've seen a great opportunity to work in an area on the coast. 

This is right about where the equator crosses the coast in the county of Jama, in the province of Manabi. This is sort of the third way that we're trying to be the most effective that we can as a small organization for habitat conservation. This is an area that until very recently was completely cut off from the rest of Ecuador. There were no roads that serviced this area at all. In fact, many people remember getting to their haciendas, their farms, by boat. They would go up and down the coastline and then just pull up on the sand beach. And at low tide there were buses that would run up and down the sand. So they would have, imagine a bus schedule in which the bus schedule says, okay, it departs at low tide minus three and a half hours. [LAUGHTER] It wasn't like 7:45. You had to know when the low tide was because they have to get around some of these rocky points. 

And occasionally there's some great stories of the bus kind of getting a little late and then all the sudden it's high tide so you can't get around that point. So they have to kind of pull inland and there's this big gypsy camp out moment in which everybody just has to spend the night until the bus can keep on moving. So this area was very cut off until about the '70s when some roads started to penetrate. But only recently have those roads been built up into kind of modern sort of what we would think of as a big super highway. And so, consequently, this area is very undervisited by people. The land is held by a small number of people, and there's a tremendous amount of forest left here even though we're technically in this dry forest, which, as I mentioned, is about 98% or 99% deforested throughout Latin America. Okay, so, again, some pictures of where we are. This is, in the box up here in the northwest, the province of Manadi. That's what the coastline looks like. I'll come back to this image in a bit, but for the moment you can notice the warm tranquil coastline. 

And these darker blobs, which are actual intact forest habitat, this is another one here, sort of surrounded by these somewhat lighter areas which have all been converted to agriculture, to pasture, and actually a fair bit of shrimp farming. All these black areas here, those are all shrimp ponds. Much like a cranberry bog, they flood a shallow area of a few acres in size. They stock it with shrimp larvae. One of Ecuador's biggest exports is shrimp. Actually, Ecuador's biggest exports are interesting. So, oil, which is a big story for Ecuador, shrimp often, bananas often, and tourism are all sort of tied for the top. Ecotourism is particularly driven by the Galapagos which accounts for maybe $400 million a year in national revenue, but also places like the Amazon and some of these other kinds of places. Okay, if you're looking up at the satellite that's taking the picture down, this is what it looks like. Big, tall canopy. 

It's a fig tree. We have howler monkeys and kinkajous that run around in all kinds of great wildlife there. From the outside, it's an interesting mix of very tropical species, like the royal palm in the front, and other dry forest elements, things that are adapted to be able to withstand a dry climate. So at this time of year if you were to go down there, you would see most of those trees brown and leafless. It looks a lot like fall does here. Okay, so we formed, in this area, site called the Lalo Loor Dry Forest Reserve. It's named after the major habitat type and after this man named Lalo, which is short of Eudaldo, a great Latin name. I'd never heard of anyone named Eudaldo before. But Eudaldo Loor is a very forward thinking guy. He's actually a dairy farmer. 

He makes a delicious yogurt. He's been to Wisconsin, and he attended a dairy expo here many years ago. He's very progressive and had this large piece of about 500 acres of intact forest that he remembered as a child and wanted his children and grandchildren to be able to grow up enjoying. So we worked with him to set aside this forest. Now, in this particular case, we have a conservation contract with him in which he has given us the right to manage the reserve. So we build the infrastructure and we have it open for tourism, for volunteers, and we take  school groups there as well. And in exchange, we pay him essentially a rental that is a percentage of the total income of the reserve. The idea is we'll continue to run this as a foundation until the reserve is fully sustainable as an economic project, and then it will be turned over to the people that are working there now and other local residents that have been interacting with us since the beginning and just be a locally run reserve that continues to carry out that conservation contract with Mr. Loor. We have a lot of ecotourism that goes on there, both international and national. We bring school groups from some of the local high schools and elementary schools. 

For many of these kids, surprisingly, it's the first time they've ever seen a monkey, and they go crazy because whenever anybody sees a monkey for the first time it's incredible. They live only a couple miles from this place, and yet they often grow up in these little towns and there's this sort of, I don't know, kind of this negativism about being from the country, from el campo, where if they've kind of made it to living in town, they don't want to deal with the dirty forest. So there's this sort of looking down on the forest even though, as westerners, that's one of the first things we want to see. Let's go in an see are there tarantulas, are there monkeys, are there great toucans and things like this. But I think it's inherent in, especially, children and in most people to have this appreciation of nature, and so when we get them into the forest, they go crazy and they run around and collect bugs and they're really fun to watch in the forest. So we do that both in the reserve, we also have some education programs in the schools. We work with teachers and directly with the students. And so through that method, try to raise awareness throughout this region of the value of protecting forests, trying to promote the protection of this area in general, especially because it forms a near corridor running north/south and also running up in elevation. I'm going to just go back to this picture. I think I've got it here. 

Let's see. Let's go back to this for a second. Running north and south, if you continue up and down this coastline, if you go to the north, you get to Colombia, and as you get closer to Colombia it gets extremely wet. Right along that border of Colombia there's places that are, it's not in this picture, it's considerably further up, but still, when you get to the border of Colombia, there's places that get six meters of rainfall a year. So that's 18 feet, which is probably about the height of this ceiling or so. That's a lot of water. And then when you go down south, you eventually get down to Guayaquil and to the border with Peru. That's a desert in Peru, like the town of Paita, places that they've hardly ever seen rain at all. So we're in the very center of this pretty amazing gradient between extremely wet climate to the north and extremely dry climate to the south. And in very dry years, this area feels like an area further to the south. 

The dry season is longer, there's less rain in the rainy season. And in very wet years, it feels like an area further to the north. So we think that animals, pollinators of orchids, dispersers of seeds, like toucans and lots of others are sensitive to these changes and utilize this north/south corridor to be able to buffer these changes. Whether they're naturally occurring, just season from one year to the next, or, as we suspect will happen, being forced by global climate change. And that's expected to have a largely wetting impact on the western coast of Ecuador. It should become greater levels of precipitation there. Second, you can see where this first layer of clouds are located right here. That's because there is a little chain of mountains that gets up to about 700 meters, so about 2,000 feet of elevation, that runs parallel to the coast, and for the reasons that I talked about before, orographic rainfall, adiabatic lapse rate, it's always cloudy there. It's very difficult to find satellite images of this region that don't have clouds on those peaks. They're always cloudy. 

And I'll show you some pictures in a sec, but they look like a little cloud forest even though they're only at 600-700 meters of elevation, so 2,000 feet, where before we were at 7,000 feet. So this forms, also, an altitudinal corridor between low level areas that are a little bit warmer and show representatives of that drier forest fauna and flora scaling up in elevation to the higher areas that are cooler and wetter and have some of those more moist elements. So, again, this is kind of what the lowland area looks like. Just a brief slide apropos of nothing to show you about what the habitat loss rates have looked like. This doesn't go very far. But you see most of it by the '80s was lost from virtually the entire region. All that following roads, you can see the road in the middle picture going up to Esmeralda, so then the clearing expanded out from that road. So we've been trying very hard to help support the formation of this area as a biological corridor. Now, I hope you can see the differences here, but basically what I did was I took that same map of the corridor, we kind of rotated it a little bit, and all those areas that were that dark blob of intact forest, I've outlined here with these lighter colored patches located on top of each of these forests. This one in red is actually the Lalo Loor, I was going to say El Pahuma, the Lalo Loor Reserve itself. 

And you can see these forest patches that we identified that form into this largely southwest to northeast corridor. Through a variety of different measures, we've succeeded in getting local landowners to protect all of these areas that are highlighted in that lighter green. So a large area around the reserve itself, these areas up in the higher regions, further down to the south, this point here called Punta -- and some other areas and then a few that are off of this particular map. We don't need that-- But we have set aside a large proportion of the areas that still remain in forests in that region. And the idea is to work with local landowners to help them to find different ways of setting aside forests and make this corridor as continuous as possible. Over the long term, there are still gaps between these forests, areas that are not up on the tops of mountains or in inaccessible places, and those areas we're increasingly working with a governmental agency to promote reforestation of patches between each of these forested areas in order to create and actual continuous forested corridor that will run up and down this north and south region. Okay, so that's a little bit of a picture from about sea level to that first row of mountains, which is about 500 meters of elevation, about 1600 feet. Behind that is actually the next one that gets way up high. You have some of these orchids from the lowlands are things like Dimerandra. It's not very common, but it is there. 

Notilia, very pretty sort of candelabra hanging type of species. Psychopsis, the butterfly orchid. This was first brought to England in 1833 and largely sparked the big popular orchid craze. If anybody knows the Duke of Devonshire, this whole story, that's the orchid that he saw that sort of drove him into this frenzy. That occurs naturally there. And then as you go up into higher elevation, look at what this forest looks like. It's white not because it's overexposed but because it's cloudy. So you have these very wet, all these Anthurium, these are kind of your typical philodendron type houseplants. And very wet kind of mossy forest, not at all dissimilar to El Pahuma. Here you have things like Pescatoria. 

These are just, we were there for about a three-day surveying visit and found a number of these orchids in flower. Small terrestrial species, like Cyclopogon. Some very pretty species called Ornithocephalus. That's a very fan-shaped cluster of leaves in the upper right-hand corner, and these were small, white flowers. And so in this region we're engaging in a number of different approaches to try to raise the awareness of the value of protecting habitat, not just in our reserve itself but also throughout the region. We, with donations and other support, built a school in the local community in this town called Tabuga that's about five minutes from the reserve. And it's basically a big library facility with a couple of other meeting rooms, and then it sits kind of adjacent to the public school so kids go back and forth. They take their recess in the library. Kind of an odd story here. So there must be Spanish speakers in the room. 

Does anybody know the word in Spanish for library. >> Biblioteca. >> Yeah, biblioteca. Right. So, biblioteca, there aren't a lot of libraries in rural Ecuador and kids didn't know the word biblioteca and the closest word that they did know was discoteca. [LAUGHTER] Which means discotheque, right? So you would see like a couple of little five-year-olds running down the street, where you going, where you going? And they say, oh, we're going to the discoteca. And it's sort of adorably sad that this, on the one hand, it's very cute and funny, and, on the other hand, it's kind of sad that this is the closest word that they've got to library. But anyway, they love this library. They like going there as much or more than they like going to school. We run all kinds of basic literacy programs, environmental education programs. 

Illiteracy rate in the town among adults is about 70%. So you don't get a lot of parents helping their kids read, and so anybody to try to bring in books and help them read, very important. And if you read, you can be sitting on top of the world or whatever that little kid is doing precariously on top of a pile of plastic chairs. Ceiba also engages in environmental education for non-locals, and those involve study abroad programs that we run for students of the University of Wisconsin, and also it's open to students from elsewhere. Some of these programs also bring Ecuadorians to join us. So in the bottom, in the left-hand corner, that's Diana Burgos, the person the right, Ecuadorian and has now been associated with the foundation for a long time. And we get all kinds of other students coming and going, some which are unfairly made to carry every piece of item that they need for fieldwork. Poor Michelle in the picture on the right is carrying every kind of thing that you can... So, anyway, we get these people to come down, and we teach, of course, tropical biology, tropical ecology, but largely we're going to our reserves and many other conservation locations to show people in real-time, practically, what is going on in conservation these days. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches to all the different kinds of problems. 

So we're trying to kind of train the next generation, as it were, of conservation professionals. We also engage in ecotourism. That's been kind of a theme throughout this. That's a picture, by the way, in the right-hand side, of Rene Lima, that man furthest to the right. He's the son of the landowner at El Pahuma. When we first started working with Rene, he was painfully shy, and he had learned a little bit about orchids after this kind of training program that we had helped him to take. So we came with these students, there were about 15 of us, I think, and we put him on the spot. We were like, Rene, you should tell them something about orchids. And so poor, Rene, it was not a nice thing to do. Everybody's biggest fear is public speaking, right? So he's sort of looking down at the orchid and kind of peeking up at people and, well, it's an orchid and... 

So when he first got started, he was very quiet and very shy, and now, I kid you not, you cannot shut this guy up. He has a ton of great stories. He's an awesome guide. He gets people off the buses and gets them running and has tons of stuff to say about orchids, about archeology in the region. He's incredibly well educated now. He teaches other guides and guide training programs. So part of this ecotourism is, like I said, to promote it as a profession and a source of income for local people. Tourism to the reserves, visitors to the reserves, is one of the best sources of income for these places. So it supports guides. It supports the construction of basic infrastructure like trails, visitor centers, housing areas. 

It, importantly, supports staff that engage in patrols. At the Lalo Loor Reserve we have a problem on the back side of the reserve that we get people sneaking in and stealing wood from the reserve. You can hear the chainsaw, but by the time you get up there, they're already gone. And so we're increasingly trying to send patrols with radios and cameras and stuff to go around the reserve and try to control this. So all of these things and raising of basic ecological or conservation awareness are some of the big goals, of course, of ecotourism. Now, ecotourism has been around for a while. It's kind of amazing to think that before 1970, or thereabouts, nobody ever went to the Galapagos. It was sort of this kind of hellish landscape of heat and no water, and nobody would have dreamed of going there. Now they sell tours for tons and tons of money to go see the Galapagos. But now ecotourism is, as I've said, one of the probably top four sources of income for a country like Ecuador. 

And people got to the Galapagos, they go to the Amazon, and they go to lots of other places as well. And increasingly, orchids themselves are becoming this kind of destination unto themselves. So in a manner similar to the development of Audubon societies, in ornithological bird watching societies, people used to, a hundred years ago or more, go out and go bird watching with a shotgun. And they'd be like, oh, that's a really beautiful, wham, bam, you know, and get these birds down, and then they would stuff them and put them over the mantlepiece. And that's kind of what birdwatching was for a while. And everything else too. People would got to Africa and that's the whole thing. But then Audubon, James Audubon comes along and he starts painting pictures of birds in habitat fishing or making their nests, and people become more interested in the idea of these animals as components of an ecosystem they're knit in with, they're food sources or they're prey or they're predators, and they got more interested in seeing birds in habitat, and, increasingly, birdwatching societies, ornithological associations, are excellent sources of funding to support the protection of habitats for birds, whether those are migratory species or just beautiful birds in the tropics. So we've seen kind of a developing trend that's very similar in orchid societies where, as I've said, they've made this transition from just appreciating plants in pots in greenhouses to wanting to go to areas of orchid habitat. You see them in the wild, you see what the conditions are like that you're trying to replicate in greenhouses, and you appreciate them with your pollinators, with the smell of the mushrooms and all these kind of things that make them richer than just a single individual thing by itself. 

So orchid tours have become pretty popular and are serving this need to support reserves in Ecuador and other countries. Some of the operators are a place called Ecuagenera. This is a very well known company that sells orchids from Ecuador. They have a big, giant sustainable production operation. They produce more than a million plants per year, sell them all over the world, but they also do a really nice tour through Ecuador visiting all these places where orchids are in flower. The Orchid Conservation Alliance, which are friends of ours from San Diego, lead tours once or twice a year. They went to Colombia, they went to Brazil, they came to Ecuador. That's designed to support some of these local reserves. And the Ceiba Foundation ourselves lead tours to some of our orchid destinations and also occasionally to the Galapagos Islands. So we'll put those together as a package, take people to the Andes to see El Pahuma, and then go to the Galapagos Islands. 

I think a few people in the audience have been with us on these tours. And then, finally, we noticed that there's this increasing demand. Just like when birdwatchers started to really become numerous, there was this demand for guidebooks that were easily understandable for birds. So things like the Peterson's Guide, and more recently the Sibley Guide, have become this sort of de facto resource that you have to have when you go birdwatching. That doesn't really exist for orchids. People have made little booklets, like this gentleman in the lower picture here. That's just a self-made packet that some friends of ours made for areas near Quito. But myself and two other friends of mine decided to put a book together called Introduction to the Orchids of Tropical America. I can't imagine I'm going to make any money on this book. I don't think anybody makes any money on books anymore, but the idea is that you produce a resource for people to use if they're going to go on these tours. 

And so the book has photographs of the major groups of orchids, ways to recognize them so it's a little easier, especially for newcomers but even for experts, to recognize the actual names of the orchids, but, more importantly, you understand why do they look that way. Why are pouch flowers that way. Why are tubular flowers that way. Why are orchids in high elevations always fuzzy? Well, it's because they get cold and it actually keeps them warm. So all these kinds of things trying to connect the ecology of these plants to what they look like. If you look at birds, people understand them pretty well. Things that go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang are woodpeckers, and we know that they're eating. Birds that hover on their wings are hummingbirds, and they're feeding in flowers. Ducks are paddling around on the lake and then diving under to feed. So we know these things that distinguish different groups of birds, but it's hard to know that for orchids. 

So we took a stab at kind of creating a guidebook that covers about 120 genera. Some examples of some of the beautiful pictures that we have over there. It goes into the ecology, some of the history, that story about Benedikt Roezl, the guy that shipped eight tons of orchids, he lost his hand in an accident, went around with a hook for maybe 20 years. So this terrifying orchid guy with a steel hook. [LAUGHTER] And history of where they found these things, where the first orchid came from, and things like this. And also because we're trying to promote tourism to these reserves, we've scoured all throughout Mexico to Brazil and the Caribbean to find reserves like El Pahuma that are explicitly dedicated to orchid habitat or that are forest reserves that cover habitat that should be good for orchids and highlight those in a whole chapter. So if you're going to go to Costa Rica, you can look in here and we have 20 or so reserves in Costa Rica, and this book would server perfectly well for there. So that said, I'll show a few pictures and try to wrap it up. This is Trisetella. These are mostly, these are largely Ecuadorian species but some other ones from Colombia. 

Acineta, very beautiful hanging kind of candelabra style. Laelia. This is a Brassia. That's actually from Mexico but very similar in Ecuador. Bareria lindleyana, named after Lindley, a very famous orchid biologist and writer from the 1800s. So, I think I'll wrap it up there. I hope that I've kind of tried to challenge some of the notions that you might have had coming in about the way the conservation works, and I hope that have had a chance to show you that although we might read frequently about sort of gloomy headlines of deforestation, loss of habitat, and extinction of species, I'm not trying to countersay that, those things are happening all the time, but I think it's important to realize that there also are little modest success stories going on all the time that are due to very dedicated people like the Lima family, small organizations like ours and many others, and to people back in the states and elsewhere that donate and support these kinds of causes. So I think it's important to understand that there are successes going on all the time and that it's important to sort of stay involved in conservation, to not just feel like, oh, it's all being cut down and there's nothing we can do about it but, in fact, there are a number of really great success stories. So, thank you very much for your time, and I'll be happy to stick around afterward for questions. [APPLAUSE]   [APPLAUSE]