When the botanists of the past collected plants to classify and archive in scientific collections, they could hardly have imagined the many applications the specimens would have for today’s researchers. Daniel Gómez, 68, a biologist who has overseen the herbarium at the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology in Jaca — the country’s third largest with over 650,000 specimens — says that nowadays, one of the key questions facing these valuable natural libraries is how to best register plants to serve the unknown needs of the future. Gómez, who has a passion for the flora and ecology of mountains, is a living dictionary of all things botanical. But he gives credit to all those who came before him in the accumulation of the knowledge for such scientific collections, and he emphasizes how much is still unknown when it comes to plants.
Question. Do we know much less about plants than we think?
Answer. We know much more about plants than nature in general, but like all other areas, there are so many more unknowns than knowns. We don’t even have a measure of what we don’t know. The 18th-century naturalists prior to Darwin never imagined that many years later, some of the plants they collected would be subject to genetic analysis, because genes were not even known about at the time. The same thing is happening to us now. To mention just one aspect, plants are a chemical arsenal. In fact, they are the source of many medicines we use. Now, as analytical techniques in chemistry advance, new alkaloids and substances are being found in plants whose components we thought we already knew. In reality, we often only know the names of plants.
Q. Is there still a lot to discover underground?
A. Yes, because in our observation of nature, we have a blind spot — we only notice what we can see, which is what sticks out of the ground. The parts we see of a plant are its leaves, which are equivalent to its photovoltaic panels, and its flowers, which are its sexual organs. When we give flowers as gifts, we are giving sexual organs. But it is the underground part that governs the plant. In fact, what is most constant is underground: the roots. In the winter, many species lose their aerial parts; trees shed their leaves, they shed everything, and then they are reborn the following spring from their roots.
Q. What plant mysteries most intrigue you?
A. Orchids have a biology that is similar to plants like onions, carrots and potatoes, whose parts we eat are the ones that are underground. These edible species, and other ornamental ones, are comprised of bulbs underneath the earth, from which every year sprout their flowers and leaves. But there are plants like the ghost orchid (Epipogium aphyllum) that can go for 30 years without coming to the surface. They only come out during certain years. We think it’s because they’re not finding the right conditions, but we don’t know what factors determine that behavior.
The botanist, at the institute’s headquarters in Jaca this week.Verónica Lacasa
Q. Is it a mistake to think that plants don’t move?
A. Individual plants don’t move, but populations of plants do, via their seeds. In fact, it’s possible that none of the species we have in Spain originated here, that they’re all immigrants. Seeds can fly for very long distances and spend centuries waiting for the right moment to grow.
Q. Why is so important to preserve herbariums?
A. With the advancements being made in genetics, microbiology and molecular biology, sometimes people think that these collections are obsolete, a thing of the 19th century, and in many places, they have been neglected and have disappeared. But if we lose them, we can’t get them back. Here, we have plants that are a hundred years old, but in the herbariums of Madrid and Barcelona, there are specimens that are 300 years old. These collections represent an enormous amount of work by many people, and that alone demands that they be preserved. But, as we have seen in the past, they also have an enormous value that we cannot even yet imagine. For example, one of the causes of the extinction or sharp decline of amphibians is a fungus, and one of the things we are studying here is in Jaca is whether that fungus was already present in the old specimens of zoological collections, or whether it is a new occurrence.
Q. Are we seeing the disappearance of the researcher who is dedicated to collecting and describing plants?
A. Yes, we are losing them in part, because science has its tendencies, its trends. Taxonomy, the study of biodiversity, has fallen off sharply, because right now what is more in vogue are discoveries in genetic and molecular biology. There are few research positions for taxonomists and their scientific results are valued much less. Paradoxically, we know barely 1% of the planet’s biodiversity. We talk a lot about conserving biodiversity, but how can we conserve what we don’t know?
Q. How are you substituting their work with volunteers?
A. We try to supplement the work of professionals with what we call citizen scientists. Here in Aragón [the region of Spain where Jaca is located], we have a project that is unique to Europe that involves the participation of 400 volunteers, none of whom are professionals in the world of biology. It’s led by a friend of the institute named Begoña García and every one of the participants monitors a different plant that is considered a bio-indicator. The annual tallying of these plants allows us to carry out a diagnostic of the health of the entire region. Of course, this would be impossible to do with paid professionals.
Q. Does the quality of the study of biodiversity decrease when it’s done by amateur volunteers?
A. There are now amateurs in Europe who have more knowledge of biodiversity than professionals, we’re finally seeing here in Spain what once made us so jealous of other European countries like the United Kingdom and France. There is a lot of skill among the volunteers, although the study must be coordinated by a scientist, who supplies the vision and can elaborate on its data.
Q. What do you think about the mobile applications that help people to identify plants without botanical knowledge?
A. They’re a great advancement, but one can’t believe that they are all it takes to know nature. Imagine if you could point your phone at a person on the street, and the screen tells you that their name is Luis Pérez. You’d carry on without knowing anything else. The application gives you the name of the plant, but that’s a minuscule part of the story. Sometimes they say, what do you need a botanist for, a professional? But scientists have to go far beyond that, the name is nothing.
Q. What can the Jaca herbarium tell us about climate change?
A. Here at the institute we prefer to talk about global change, which is to say, the change that occurs in nature, part of which is the climate. And that’s nothing new — Heraclitus once said that everything flows, and so do we. The question is the speed of that change. Right now, we are taking old specimens from the herbarium, noting where they were collected and going back to see if they are still there or if they have disappeared.
Q. And what are you finding?
A. Well, if we’re speaking in reference to global change, the greatest extinction of species we have recorded is of plants related to farmland. Obviously, this is due to the use of pesticides. The disappearance of this type of plant is much greater than we can yet attribute to rising temperatures. An example is the poppy. A few years ago, the fields were red with poppies, and now they can hardly be seen.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition