{"id":3309,"date":"2014-12-20T09:35:37","date_gmt":"2014-12-20T14:35:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=3309"},"modified":"2014-12-20T09:35:37","modified_gmt":"2014-12-20T14:35:37","slug":"asias-fragile-caves-face-new-risks-from-development-by-mike-ives-yale-environment-360","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=3309","title":{"rendered":"Asia\u2019s Fragile Caves Face New Risks from Development by Mike Ives: Yale Environment 360"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/e360.yale.edu\/feature\/asias_fragile_caves_face_new_risks_from_development\/2833\/\">Asia\u2019s Fragile Caves Face New Risks from Development by Mike Ives: Yale Environment 360<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-family: georgia, times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px; color: #000000;\">Botanist\u00a0<a style=\"color: #005626; text-decoration: none;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.missouribotanicalgarden.org\/plant-science\/plant-science\/research-staff\/article\/500\/zhang-li-bing.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">Li-Bing Zhang<\/a>\u00a0has 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.<\/p>\n<p>About 10 of the specimens, including a cave fern that his team had found in<a style=\"color: #005626; text-decoration: none;\" href=\"http:\/\/whc.unesco.org\/en\/list\/951\" target=\"_blank\">Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park<\/a>\u00a0in central Vietnam, were probably\u00a0<\/span>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. \u201cThe problem is that a lot of species go extinct unnoticed,\u201d Zhang told me while trekking through a forest in jeans and rubber boots. \u201cThat\u2019s why we do our collecting.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-family: georgia, times, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px; color: #000000;\">Limestone formations in Southeast Asia, or karsts, which spread across a belt of non-contiguous land\u00a0<a style=\"color: #005626; text-decoration: none;\" href=\"http:\/\/bioscience.oxfordjournals.org\/content\/56\/9\/733.full#F2\" target=\"_blank\">nearly the size of California<\/a>, contain fragile and biodiverse environments. The caves\u2019 dark, humid passages play host to dozens of species of ferns, bats, insects, spiders, mites, blind fish, and many other plants and invertebrates.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a name=\"OLE_LINK2\"><\/a><a name=\"OLE_LINK1\"><\/a><span style=\"font-size: 13pt; font-family: LucidaGrande; color: #282828;\">&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Asia\u2019s Fragile Caves Face New Risks from Development by Mike Ives: Yale Environment 360. Botanist\u00a0Li-Bing Zhang\u00a0has 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[34,72,2040],"class_list":["post-3309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-asia","tag-biodiversity","tag-caves"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3310,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3309\/revisions\/3310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}