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" Checklist of Myanmar's rich Bio-diversity "
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Myanmar is a country rich in bio-diversity. There are numerous birds, fishes, mammals, reptiles, insects and flora species. Since 1912 an inventory of the country’s plants was done by Conservator of Forests Mr. J. C Lace. Then Mr. Hundley and U Chit Ko Ko of Myanmar’s Forest Department again did another inventory in 1957 and the book “Trees, Shrubs, Herbs and Climbers of Myanmar” was published. Now, Dr. John Kress of U.S based Smithsonian Institution in collaboration with the Forest Department was able to update Mr. Hundley’s book “A Checklist of the Trees, Shrubs, Herbs and Climbers of Myanmar”. Swiftwinds Travels, a premier travel agency based in Myanmar had helped Dr. Kress to organize many of his expeditions and as such was able to arrange an interview with Dr. John Kress at their office with MRTV-3.
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Dr. John Kress
I’m a botanist. And I work at the national museum in natural at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
I’ve been and this is my 13th visit here to Myanmar. Each one of them is been to explore the plants of this country.
I have been working in tropical areas in around for 25 years. And I’m always been interested in plants in this part of the world and I have the opportunity in 1996 to come along with some other Smithsonian partners (or) other biologist to Myanmar and I took that opportunity and now I’m here.
Actually, the first checklist of Plants in Myanmar was published in 1912. On that list, there were 2,000 species of plants, which was updated with number of times, the last time being in 1960. When 7,000 species were listed in and there were a few more added in 1980.
And our recent checklist that we’ve just published one month ago, we have about 2,000 species listed for Myanmar that point.
This book is important for number of reasons
1) It tells the world about the plants in Myanmar and many partners do not know about the plants here.
2) Secondly, it gives a new resource for foresters for students for the professors and for the land managers and resource managers to begin to understand the botanical diversity of this country.
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We now have about 11,885 listed and those are the known species and I’m sure there are many unknown species we have to find here this country.
I hope it will help the students, many of the professors at the University of Yangon and the Mandalay as well as the partners in the Forest Department. We were bearing instrumental and putting the checklist together and there is may be a dozen people in Myanmar that help as well as scientist around the world. So, now we are ready to distribute this and I hope that everyone understand that the plant life in this country much better.
There are several centers that are concentrated in botanical research now in Myanmar. One is here in Yangon at the University; the other is in Yaezin at the Forest Research Institute.
But we feel that it’s now time to consolidate and this is working with the Forest Department in University to consolidate botanical studies by establishing the new botanical research center and this will be at the Kandawgyi National Botanical Garden in Pyin Oo Lwin in Mandalay and we hope this center will be able to bring partners from all over the country as well as international and foreign scientists here to Myanmar to work on the plants of the country together.
We signed MoU actually with the Forest Department about 5-years ago and we’ve been working very intensively with them but last year, in talking with professor at the University of Yangon we decided we needed more opportunity to teach students and to teach classes and bring students to the fields.
Today, I’m proud to say yes! We sign a new MoU to begin more interaction between the Smithsonian and the University here.
I’m very proud of find new plants here. Since my specialty is the classification of gingers, we’ve been looking at them over last few years and we did. We found the two new species, which we published just this last month one from north Mandalay in the mountain there and the other from near Pyay. Both of these were unknown designs. We made the first collection we publish them with my colleague U Thet Tun who works at Kandawgyi National Botanical Garden. And now, they are for all the world to see.
I think the last important thing is to understand that Myanmar still has some very important trust and understood forest and like other countries in Southeast Asia which have suffer many years in decade of deviational forest. Myanmar still has a very prestige areas and one of the reasons I’ve been here working is to explore the areas and hope that we can prevent some of the disturbance and destruction that is happened in another part of Southeast Asia.
For that reason, I think this book is very important and I think we all have many new species to add that we explore the understood forest.
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