Our story begins with a visit to Pulao Tioman, a beautiful tropical isle off the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia. In a risky move on Oct. 31st, 1998, right at the end of the tourist season with the monsoon rains threatening to begin any minute and the hotels and restaurants closing their doors (literally in our faces), a group of four hardy bryologists (Ben Tan, Brent Mishler, Leslie Harrison and Meng-Shen Choy) took the rough boat ride out for a four-day, three night stay on the island (half deserted at this time of the year).
Over the last two years Tioman Island has been the subject of a floristic study by Ben Tan and Haji Mohamed. It was of interest to our PEET project because of the large number of species of Calymperaceae (and the related family Leucobryaceae) known to occur there. Our plan was to collect fresh material of these two families for molecular, microscopic, and culture studies, and to add to the floristic knowledge of the island by visiting previously uncollected localities.
The latter effort is to ensure a complete floristic survey of the island's moss flora, because we have a second goal in mind. We want to attempt a biogeographic comparison between it and a remote oceanic island of similar size and elevation, Moorea (Society Islands, French Polynesia). The latter island is the site of a field station belonging to UC Berkeley (the Richard P. Gump South Pacific Biological Research Station) and has itself been the subject of intensive floristic investigation, beginning with Whittier and De Sloover, and currently by Brent Mishler and Dennis Wall. We hope that by comparing the biological features of the moss floras in a remote oceanic island with that of similar islands found in a continental "source" area such as Tioman, we can gain insights into biogeographic, ecological, and evolutionary processes.
On Tioman, we visited several localities, including a very rich waterfall near Mukut at the southern tip of the island, and hiked up and over the central ridge of the island in order to observe an elevational gradient of moss distribution. By the end of the trip, we had added more than 10 species to the current manuscript listing Tioman mosses (prepared by Tan and Mohamed). In particular, our finds doubled the number of species of Calymperaceae reported from the island. The night before we left, some of the island resorts were feasting the local residents and tourists with free food and drink in "celebration" of the closing down of the lodging places because of the expected arrival of monsoonal rains. The food was good, and the rains fortunately held off while we were on the island, but they descended with a vengeance just as we were leaving the island on what might have been the last boat-load of homeward bound tourists for the season!
The next stop was Singapore, under the joint sponsorship of the UC Berkeley PEET grant and the National University of Singapore. For purposes of collecting fresh material of Calymperaceae and Leucobryaceae, two of us (Ben Tan and Brent Mishler) visited several natural sites in Singapore. On many of these trips we were accompanied by Aino Juslén, a visiting student who was in town preparing a liverwort flora of Singapore for her graduate thesis at the University of Helsinki under the supervision of Dr. S. Piippo.
One exciting bryological field trip in Singapore was a boat ride to nearby Pulao Ubin, an island in the Strait of Johore between Singapore and Malaysia, where extensive mangroves and inland secondary forest still exist. On this trip we were accompanied by several students from the National University of Singapore and staff members from the Singapore Botanical Gardens. Highlights of the Pulau Ubin visit included the sighting of giant swimming monitor lizards, rising tides which flooded our trail out of the mangroves, and a large, puffed-up male turkey who felt he owned a stretch of the road and forced us to run around him (he wouldn't have dared try doing that in the U.S. so close to Thanksgiving Day!). We were also excited to find extensive patches of the enigmatic hornwort Notothylas on low-lying soil. Indeed, the visit to Pulau Ubin was a very enjoyable and successful trip for both mosses and liverworts, as well as hornworts.
In Singapore, where high rises and business establishments have proliferated in recent years, a visit to Bukit Timah, a Nature Reserve containing primary forest right in the center of the city, is a must for every visiting botanist. While the forest here has never been cut (and contains hundreds of tree species in only 75 hectares), it is such a small patch that it has been subjected to drying effects of air movement and sunlight. Thus, the under-canopy of the forest contains fewer epiphytic bryophytes and lichens than one would expect.
The final major field expedition was to Mount Kinabalu on the island of Borneo, in the state of Sabah, Malaysia, undertaken by Brent Mishler and Haji Mohamed, accompanied by Berhaman Ahmad, Mashitah Yusoff, Rimi Repin, and Johnny Gisil. Again the dual goal was to collect fresh material of Calymperaceae and Leucobryaceae, and to expand on the solid base of floristic knowledge already available for the mountain (summarized in the colored guidebook to bryophytes published by Frahm et al. in 1996).
Mt. Kinabalu Park is a veritable wonderland of biodiversity, home to the famous Rafflesia (the world's largest flower), fifteen species of the giant pitcher plant Nepenthes, and more than 4,000 other species of tracheophytes (estimates are that there are nearly 1,000 species of orchids alone!), and 1,000 species of bryophytes, with vegetation types ranging from lowland rainforest to alpine scrub. Unfortunately, the park today is an island in a sea of deforestation across Sabah State. It is thus somewhat depressing driving up the mountain road to reach the park headquarters (not to mention dangerous given our driver's penchant for passing on blind curves!). But once there, the pristine vegetation, clear, cool air, rushing streams, and above all, the sublime views of the granite peaks looming above made the trip extremely rewarding and worthwhile. An extensive, well-maintained trail system allows access to all the vegetation zones on the mountain. A cable canopy walkway suspended up to 45 meters above the ground allows visitors to reach the forest canopy in the lowland rainforest at Poring Hot Springs. After sampling at a range of elevations, we came away convinced this is a wonderland for mosses and liverworts as well (with lots of gentle rain beginning precisely at noon each day!).
We hope to continue and expand the current enthusiastic spirit of cooperation among our three institutions, which are strategically positioned spanning the Pacific Rim. This rich mix of fieldwork, carried out jointly by local experts, visiting specialists, and students -- focused both on floristics of an area as well as on intensive systematic studies of particular groups -- is a very efficient way of utilizing resources, and also a good way for both professors and students to learn together about bryophyte systematics and ecology. At a time of limited resources, cooperative research ventures and multi-university training of students make especially good sense (and are a heck of a lot of fun, we must admit).
[As a side note, the facilities at the Park Headquarters are first rate, including accommodations and research buildings, with plush seminar rooms. We thus propose Kinabalu Park as an ideal site for a future IAB meeting, the first in Southeast Asia.]