Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 5, Number 2, 1 February 1988 — Flora Workshop Held with Noted Scientists [ARTICLE]

Flora Workshop Held with Noted Scientists

With the hope of helping to produce a Flora of the Philippines encyclopedia before it is too late, Bishop Museum last month sponsored an international workshop in Honolulu. Purpose of the workshop, sponsored under auspices of the National Science Foundation, is to produce a plan for a Flora of the Philippines projec t that could be completed in 10 years. Noted scientists from around the world participated in this workshop. Among two major participants were Dr. Peter Ashton, a professor of botany at Harvard University and a foremost authority on plants of the Malay archipelago, and

Dr. Domingo Madulid, seniorresearcherin charge of the botany division of the National Museum of the Philippines in Manila. Dr. Madulid is currently in residence at Bishop Museum. Six other participants from the Smithsonian, Michigan State University, the Netherlands, the Philippines and Bishop Museum were involved in the workshops held Jan. 13-15. The great rain forests of the Philippines onee constituted one of the earth's richest, most varied botanical wonderlands, yet no one has ever published an encyclopedia of the Flora of the Philippines. These rain forests today are under the same destructive pressures that face natural areas throughout the world, and this great botanical resource is rapidly disappearing. Many unique species have already heeome extinct. Dr. Ashton on Jan. 14 gave a public lecture in Atherton Halau on "Thirty Years of Wandering in the Forests of Borneo," an exciting, armchair account of his botanical explorations in the mysterious forest of Borneo, illustrating his experiences with a slide presentation.