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Flora of Nepal expedition 2014- Baglung, Rukum, Dolpa.

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alanelliott:
Just over two year ago I did the something very similar for the Darchula expedition I was part of and it went down well. So when I asked the SRGC for pennies to join this trip I said I would do the same again. So here it is and I'll add to it as I work through collection and am writing up the main reports.

From the 15th of August 2014 until the 15th of September 2014 I was part of the Flora of Nepal expedition to Baglung, Rukum and Dolpa Districts in Mid-West Nepal. Unlike my last trip http://www.srgc.net/forum/index.php?topic=9543 this was a Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE )led expedition;  led by Dr Colin Pendry from RBGE, myself, two Nepalese members of staff from the Nepalese Department of Plant Resources (DPR) and Dr Patrick Kuss who is from the University of Zurich and is a Sibbald fellow here at RBGE. He is a Pedicularis expert who in the middle of a global revision of the genus currently working on the Flora of Nepal account and collaborating with Chinese scientists on the Pan-Himalayan Flora. The expedition was is part of the Flora of Nepal Project coordinated by the RBGE. All the specimen data, maps and the field images will (eventually) be freely available on www.floraofnepal.org and use the botanical locator link in the top right.

As before my part in the expedition was to continue to receive field training and to collect specimens for DNA analysis as part of my PhD project to investigate the biogeography of the Himalaya. I am currently writing up the reports for the SRGC, AGS and the Davis Expedition fund who all generously supported my participation. The reports will take a little time so I'll be share some images of the landscape and some interesting plants here and on Twitter. But I'll start with some statistics because everyone loves those.

We left Kathmandu at about 6pm on the overnight Burtibang Express a journey of some 360km (220 miles). It took us 26 hours on 4 buses and a jeep to reach Bobang where we started walking. This was due to the road beyond Pokhara becoming increasingly poor and doing it at night is far too dangerous. We slept in our very leaky bus overnight. I was so soaked in the morning I had to change clothes. We started to encounter landslides, which we were aware of and had to unload the bus of all the gear, haul it over the landslide and get on another bus which had been arranged by the transport company. This was easily the most dangerous part of the whole expedition because of the atrocious road conditions. So the less said about that the better.
During our 21 days in the field we covered approximately 200km (125 miles) on foot travelling North from Bobang in Baglung District, to Rukum over the main Himalayan ridge line and into Dolpa district and the Trans-Himalaya. As to be expected working in the Himalaya our route saw us make lots of ups and downs on a daily basis and we clocked up an altitudinal loss and gain of over 27,000m (88,500 ft) over the route.

This was a much smaller expedition than my previous Nepalese trip, consisting of 5 botanists, 3 Sherpa field assistants, 1 Sherpa leader, 1 cook, 3 kitchen staff, 17 porters. In total we collected 452 herbarium specimens with the associated silica dried leaf samples for later DNA extraction. Each herbarium specimen had five duplicates made at the time of collecting; one set each for the partner institutions: RBGE, Tokyo University, National Herbarium of Nepal and Tribhuvan University. The final set is for contributing experts to have a set of whatever taxa they work on in their home herbarium. The exception was CITES listed taxa such as orchids and in those cases only two specimens were collected to stay in Nepal.


Overview of where we were


Route, Camps and Passes.


The full team of scientists, field assistants and porters with Dunai prison as a backdrop (Nice)

alanelliott:
So our daily routine was something like this

Up at 5.30-6am for a cup of tea and a bowl of washing water then pack up our personal gear.
6.30am we’d start checking how dry the previous days specimens were from the overnight drying.

If dry these would be bundled, dated and wrapped in plastic and stored in a metal trunk for protection. If they were still damp these were bundled for another night of drying.
7am (ish) we’d have breakfast as camp is dismantled around us then 7.30-8am we’d set off.We’d then walk and collected for the rest of the day until we reached camp which ranged from 3pm to almost 6pm. Depending on an inability to find a suitable camping site.

As we go we put specimens we collect into a field press. Specimens would be put in sheets of newspaper annotated with the collection number. Images are taken at the same time to capture characters like colour and shapes and sizes that are lost as the specimens are dried and squashed. Lat-Longs and altitude are taken using GPS, and a recorded waypoints which can be uploaded to the database and then the collections made at this locations are attached to this locality which minimises data entry errors.


Our field assistants putting specimens of a Parnassia in the press at 4000m once we'd crossed the Phalgune Dhuri

Once at camp then process our specimen from the day repositioning them in their newspaper before putting them into the drying press. Each specimen would be put between two bits of blotting paper and then between two aluminium corrugates. As the specimens were being sorted a small piece of leaf material from each was put in a “teabag” and these were put in silica gel to dry them out. The specimens then spent the night on the drying frame above kerosene stoves.


Colin pressing the new species of Clematis


Drying Tent.

Data from our field books were entered into a copy of Padme, the Flora of nepal database.  Once we’d finished that or had enough, which is what usually happened with data entry, we’d have dinner. This ranged from 6pm to 9.30pm and must really have annoyed the kitchen guys who wanted to cook for us get sorted and go to bed rather than hang about for us to finish.


Data entry at Phalgune.

We’d have a quick chat about the day and what we might have in store the following day look at the map etcs and then to bed to get some sleep before repeating.


Breakfast below Phalgune Dhuri where the camp including the mess tent had been dismantled around our heads leaving us to enjoy some alfresco breakfast dining.

alanelliott:
Its about time I posted some plants. I'll do this over a period of time as I work through my images and the Flora ones. Most of the names are the field idents we did using Flowers of the Himalaya and Flora of Bhutan that we had with us. It will take time to do proper identifications and I am more than happy with crowd sourced names!

I'll start off low altitude because thats what we did and as the posts progress I'll post some of my favourites from different days/altitudes etc as we move north from the subtropical valleys in Baglung to more temperate and alpine areas of Rukum and then in to the dry inner valleys of Dolpa.

These following images are from Baglung at about 1000-1200m in fairly well populated areas of rice and banana cultivation just north of Burtibang Bazar.




Didymocarpus pedicellatus in the Gesneriaceae


Corallodiscus lanuginosus


Begonia picta but with a washed out leaf because of getting some direct sun.


Sorry not very Alpine-y

Anthony Darby:
What an experience this must be. Thanks for posting.  8)

alanelliott:
From the roadhead at Bobang we spend a few hours walking up to the village of Suprang through fields of maize collecting a few more plants as we went including Corydalis, Dactylicapnos macrocapnos and Pedicularis gracilis.

Patrick explained to us that Pedicularis gracilis in the past has been split into a number of what he considers synonyms based on number of leaves and stem hair number.
He was excited to fine his plant which has a stem of leaves and hairs in 3s and one of 4s coming from the same root system.


Pedicularis gracilis with two stems with differing leaf and stem hair numbers but coming from the same root system.

Near the village of Suprang we had fun collecting Girardinia diversifolia (Himalayan Nettle) using an umbrella trying to avoid being stung - the stings are tens times worse than our Urtica. Near the end of the trek I was too busy watching some goats demolishing a field of beans to see one hanging over a drystane dyke and manages to sting an ear and my scalp. They throbbed and burned for about 12 hours and I felt the ear sting for a couple of days after, which made sleeping particularly uncomfortable as I rolled about.


Colin collecting Girardinia diversifolia. With a funeral happening in the background.

We saw and collected a number of different Codonopsis species but a highlight was Codonopsis purpurea growing as an epiphyte on Rhododendron arboretum and a couple of other trees species. We couldn’t get to it so Tenzing paid a boy to climb the tree and collect it for us. This was the only time we saw this species where as Codonopsis grey-wilsonii was far more common and seen many times in Baglung and Rukum.


Collecting Codonopsis purpurea


Codonopsis purpurea

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