How does the diversity of plant uses change as immigrant communities spend more time away from their home country, in proximity to and exchanging plant knowledge with many neighboring ethnic communities? This question is especially important in Southeast Asia with its patterns of immigration and emigration, as this area is the origin of much of the world's important economic flora: food plants such as rice, coconuts, and bananas; medicinal plants such as Artemisia annua, ginkgo, and ginseng; construction plants such as teak, rattan, and bamboo; fiber plants such as jute and ramie; and ritual plants such as tea, betel nut and jasmine. The University of Hawai'i (UH) Manoa's Plants and Mekong Migration project conducted by Nat Bletter and team members and their collaborators at Khon Kaen University, Thailand and Champasek College in Champasek, Laos, will try to answer this question using a quantitative synthesis of the relationships of the plant species, their uses, and the cultures that employ plants in order to understand the patterns of transfer of plant uses. We plan to conduct field interviews and collections with Thai and Lao speakers in Hawai'i, Thailand and Laos.

In order to preserve this valuable plant knowledge, we will return results to the communities via printed materials, "talking books", community herbaria, and ethnobotanical training. From research on food species diversity in immigrant populations (Bletter, 2007a), a quantitative synthesis of relational data on plants and cultures (Bletter, 2007b), and UH’s research on quantum ethnobotany (Winter, 2005), we hypothesize that, over time in a new country, immigrant plant use diversity initially decreases, but eventually increases with exposure to other cultures, and that newly selected plants are phylogenetically similar to the pre-immigration set of plants. Through a combination of quantum and relational efficacy ethnobotanical theory we also hypothesize that we will be able to model and predict which plants people will bring with them when they move from one area to another. Quantum ethnobotany or human survival units predict that the transferred plants are those that best help the most people survive and relational efficacy predicts that the transferred plants are those that are most effective given that many closely related plants are used by various cultures for closely related uses. Through these various computational methods spanning the field of biology, we hope to show how different cultures communicate their most valued plant knowledge, leading to a broader impact of being able to understand and possibly prevent introductions of new invasive plant species while being better able to find the origins of important crops for breeding of pest-resistant varieties.

• Software developed for this project can be downloaded for free non-commercial use here.

Thank you to Kanjana Thepboriruk for Thai translation.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0805644

Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

References

1. 1.Bletter, N. (2006). Talking books: A new method of returning ethnobiological research documentation to the non-literate. , Economic Botany, 60(1), 85-90.
   

2. 2.Bletter, N. (2007a). The Biodiversity of Your Refrigerator- An Exercise in Food Origins. Ethnobotany Research and Applications, 5, 233-239.
   

3. 3.Bletter, N. (2007b). A quantitative synthesis of the medicinal ethnobotany of the Malinké of Mali and the Asháninka of Peru, with a new theoretical framework. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine.
   

4. 4.Winter, K. (2005). Hawaiian `Awa (Piper methysticum): A Look into Re-evolving Traditions and Quantum Ethnobotany Theory, The Society for Economic Botany annual meeting. Fort Worth, Texas.