Asia’s Fragile Caves Face New Risks from Development by Mike Ives: Yale Environment 360.
Botanist Li-Bing Zhang has spent years collecting ferns in the caves and limestone formations of southwestern China and neighboring Southeast Asia. When I met him recently in a Vietnamese national park, his research vehicle, a silver van, was bursting with fern specimens. Zhang and two colleagues had found them in tropical forests and at the entrances of 10 caves.
About 10 of the specimens, including a cave fern that his team had found inPhong Nha-Ke Bang National Park in central Vietnam, were probably unknown to science, Zhang said. He planned to test his hunches when he returned to his laboratory at the Missouri Botanical Garden, where he works as an associate curator. “The problem is that a lot of species go extinct unnoticed,” Zhang told me while trekking through a forest in jeans and rubber boots. “That’s why we do our collecting.”
Limestone formations in Southeast Asia, or karsts, which spread across a belt of non-contiguous land nearly the size of California, contain fragile and biodiverse environments. The caves’ dark, humid passages play host to dozens of species of ferns, bats, insects, spiders, mites, blind fish, and many other plants and invertebrates.
