Background of the research program
With more than 34 million hectares of closed tropical forests
(Reid,1992), Papua New Guinea (PNG) ranks 9th among the most
forested tropical countries of the world. In addition, current
annual deforestation rates are much lower in PNG than elsewhere
(0.06 % of area lost annually, as compared to 0.88 % and 0.75 %
in Indonesia and Brazil, respectively; Reid, 1992).It is probable
that by the end of this century or shortly thereafter, only four
main blocks of the world's tropical rain forests are likely to
remain more or less intact: western Brazilian Amazonia, the Zaire
basin, the Guyana shield and Papua New Guinea (Swartzendruber,
1993).
Papua New Guinea is home to extreme biological diversity and high
species endemism (Gressitt, 1982; Beehler, 1993). For example,
the forest flora of PNG represents one of the most diverse
ecosystems in the Old World Tropics, with perhaps between 15,000
and 20,000 species of vascular plants (Johns,1993). PNG supports
a very rich moth fauna - more diverse than that of Borneo, for
example - of both Oriental and Australian origin (Holloway,
1987). Miller (1993) reviews the available information about PNG
arthropods and stresses the limits of present knowledge.
J. L. Gressitt initiated the Bishop Museum's ongoing faunistic
surveys throughout New Guinea in 1955. In 1961, he established a
field station in the NW part of Papua New Guinea, at Wau, which
later became the Wau Ecology
Institute (Miller, 1993). In 1987, Allen Allison (Bishop Museum) and Scott Miller (Bishop
Museum, presently Smithsonian Institution, Washington) initiated
an ongoing long-term research program at Bishop Museum, which
aims at unraveling patterns of insect diversity in the rain
forests of Papua New Guinea. Most of the field work was performed
at the Wau Ecology Institute and focused on insects collected
from fagaceous trees by canopy fogging. G. A. Samuelson (Bishop Museum) worked
extensively on the taxonomy of the material collected.
In 1989, Yves Basset
(Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute) completed in Australia
the first successful attempt to document the host specificity in
a community of herbivorous insects feeding on a species of
overstorey rainforest tree (Basset, 1992; Gaston, 1993). In 1992,
he joined the research team and spend one year in Wau as part of
a two-year research project funded by the Swiss National Science
Foundation. He studied the species richness and host specificity
of chewing insects associated with ten forest tree species
belonging to different families.
In 1994, with grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF),
the Christensen Research
Institute (CRI) and the National Geographic Society, the
research group moved on to examine the composition and the
host-specificity of leaf-chewing insects feeding on 15 species of
Ficus (Moraceae) in the Madang area, on the Northern coast
of PNG. In the course of this study, Vojtech Novotny (Czech Academy of Sciences)
joined the group, both helping to gather data about leaf-chewing
insects and studying an other important group of insect
herbivores, leafhoppers. At the same time, George
Weiblen initiated studies of the fig wasps and Ficus
spp. in New Guinean, at first as his Ph. D. research at Harvard
University, then at the Michigan State University and presently
at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). In 1996, Larry Orsak, the Director
of CRI, joined the group, naturally extending his long-term
interests in the conservation of PNG wildlife, parataxonomist
training and Lepidoptera. That year the group proceeded to study
the herbivore fauna of 15 species of Euphorbiaceae in the Madang
area.
In 1997 CRI closed down, but our research group established an
independent field station
nearby, in Nagada Harbour, and became affiliated with the Biology
Department of the University of PNG and with PNG National Museum
(Port Moresby). During 1998 and 1999, its size and research
activities further expanded. Jan Leps
(University of South Bohemia), a plant ecologist and
statistician, joined the team both for the field work on the
ecology of host plants and the analysis of insect data. Pavel Drozd, a
post-doctoral ecologist from University of Ostrava (Czech
Republic) joined the group in 1998 and Lukas Cizek, a Ph. D. student from the
University of South Bohemia started his thesis research on fig
insects within the framework of the project in 1999. With the
renewed NSF funding we were able to complete the study of
herbivores on 62 species of locally coexisting woody plants from
40 genera and 18 families, making it probably the most
comprehensive data set of its kind available from tropical rain
forests.
Our research group, which is listed by Erwin (1995) as one of the
key groups studying arboreal insects in the tropics, has
considerably matured and expanded. It is supported by genuine
taxonomic expertise (the best available for PNG) and brings
numerous combined years of experience in ecology and taxonomy of
tropical insects. One important aspect of the research program is
the training, at low resource cost, of local insect
parataxonomists. A related program of insect herbivore studies to
that implemented in PNG was also developed by Yves Basset at Mabura Hill in Guyana. After its completion,
Yves started a new study of rainforest herbivores in Panama, at
the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
References cited