So, we’ve taken some heat for not having any plants on our species list, and to make amends, we’re adding a new inventory and a blog entry to admit our oversight. The simple reasons for our omission were twofold: 1) there are lots of plants and they’re very different from our US species, and 2) plants are harder to identify than animals and we didn’t have any sort of guide. However, now that we’ve identified all the primate species, and acquired a native tree guide from our neighbors, we would be remiss not to make some attempt at plant documentation.
As in all parts of the world, plants are the foundation of the local ecological system and are essential to human life. We’re not going to include all the food crops (corn, potatoes, sugarcane, different types of bananas, beans, yams, cassava, etc.) and cash crops (tea, eucalyptus, pine) on the list, but it is worth mentioning one special group of species on peoples’ land; as we’ve mentioned previously, land is intensively used and there are lots of convoluted boundaries between small properties (This makes mapping properties very challenging- as our field assistants can attest!). There aren’t a lot of rocks or permanent materials that can be spared for boundary marking, so villagers use a small group of plant species (many non-native) that aren’t
palatable to animals (i.e. their goats) to distinguish the divisions between gardens. Sometimes these grow into “live fences” around houses and many of the species have additional medicinal properties. And occasionally, while hiking deep in the forest, we’ve come across patches of these plants, seemly growing in the middle of nowhere, but giving a hint of where the compounds of now evicted landowners used to be. We’ve posted some pictures of them on the flickr site and will continue to update the plant list for our last few weeks here!