AP News, May 24th, 2007
The mighty Mississippi isn't going to be confused with the Nile River anytime soon, and St. Louis certainly isn't rainforest country, but students from all over the world come to this city to study tropical ecology.
Scholars from more than 20 different nations attend the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center, which has an international reputation for its ecology and conservation research and educational programs. It is based at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and draws on resources at the St. Louis Zoo and the Missouri Botanical Garden, both among the top institutions of their kind.
"We're from the tropics, but we come here to study the tropics," said Cynthia Hong-Wa, 30, who came to St. Louis from Madagascar. "We come here to have a better understanding of what's going on there."
While many students return to their countries to work, or visit foreign lands for research, they say they were drawn to the St. Louis program because of the quality of the instructors and access to information. The center, tied to the university's biology department, has 50 Ph.D students and 80 getting their master's degrees.
The end result brings a little bit of the tropics to the Midwest.
Inside the Monsanto Building at the Missouri Botanical Garden, students recount their work protecting endangered species in Africa or studying biodiversity in South America.
A tropical ecology center began in 1990 at the university. It was renamed last year for Harris, a donor and member of the board that developed the center.
Elizabeth Losos is the president and CEO of the Organization for Tropical Studies, a Durham, N.C.-based consortium of 65 universities and research institutes. She also grew up in St. Louis.
"If I knew then what I know now," she said. "I never would have believed they'd produce one of the best programs in the world, and certainly in North America," she said.
Losos cited several factors that turned St. Louis into an unlikely focal point for tropical ecology study. She credited the Missouri Botanical Garden's director, acclaimed conservationist Peter Raven, with a strong vision.
She said early scholarship money helped the program attract international students, particularly from Latin America. And, she said, the garden's research created a situation where the center is internationally known. "At some point, it's an issue of critical mass," she said.
As the program's executive director, Patrick Osborne, put it: "In fact, we're better known in Bolivia, probably, than in St. Louis."
Linking the garden and the zoo to the University of Missouri-St. Louis allowed the higher education institution to provide resources that many others did not have.
Students can use the botanical garden's herbarium, which looks something like the stacks in a library but smells faintly like a spice rack.
The Whitney center's director, Peter Stevens, says there are close to 6 million dried plant specimens here. He turns a knob to open up an aisle between two rows of shelves and the lights kick on overhead. On the shelves are pages upon pages of mounted plants from all over the world, with information including the plant's name, who identified it and the geographic coordinates for where it was collected.
He said the specimens, their pollen and seedlings can be studied. Researchers can look to determine how a plant's anatomy changed over time, what the whole plant looks like and where it grows. The specimens here yield clues about the natural world.
He said botanists send in specimens for the herbarium, stuck on acid-free paper and often wrapped in foreign-language newspapers to stay safe during their travels. Opening the boxes is sort of like Christmas every day, as researchers uncover what each box holds.
Students here also have access to the latest scientific literature as well as rare books, like a 1735 copy of Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus' Systema Naturae, a Latin text that Stevens handles gently. The book classifies organisms in a system that became the international standard.
A professor in zoological studies, Patricia Parker, explains that for her research she's working with graduate students at the center, the veterinary program at the St. Louis Zoo, and the Charles Darwin Foundation, an international group of scientists on the Galapagos Islands.
The islands, located 625 miles off Ecuador's Pacific coast, are known for their unique plant and animal life. Darwin's observations of the islands' finches inspired his theory of evolution.
Parker is studying three groups of pathogens, or disease-causing agents, on the islands. The pathogens include one parasite that was having detrimental effects on certain populations, like the Galapagos Hawk, particularly on smaller islands.
While the Galapagos National Park already works hard to keep tourism from having a negative impact on the islands, the findings led researchers to recommend that tourism be further restricted on smaller islands there to avoid accidental introduction of new disease agents to particularly at-risk populations.
Researchers said the international research helps bring in students, as field assistants learn about work being done at the center. "We've had to almost stop recruiting," Osborne said. "We're very well known now."
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On the Net:
Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center: http://www.umsl.edu/biology/hwec/
