The Orchid Conservation Alliance Presents

Professor Tom Givnish is a plant ecologist and evolutionary biologist and is the Henry Allan Gleason Professor of Botany and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and his students have made seminal contributions to our understanding of plant adaptations for energy capture and reproduction, the study of adaptive radiation, and the determinants of plant species diversity. Dr. Givnish has used state-of-the-art methods and theory to analyze the relationships of phylogeny, ecology, geography, and species diversification in several species-rich and ecologically divergent groups, including bromeliads, orchids, lilies, and monocots as a whole, as well as in Eucalyptus and the Hawaiian lobeliads, one of the most striking examples of adaptive radiation in plants, and the largest plant lineage native to any single island or archipelago on Earth.

Dr. Givnish will give a lead-off presentation on the drivers of orchid biodiversity, giving a brief survey of orchid relationships based on chloroplast and nuclear data, the traits, lineages, and geographic regions associated with high rates of species diversification, hot spots of orchid diversity, and the paradox of narrow orchid endemism. This global framework should provide perspectives on the OCA efforts in Ecuador and Colombia.

Lou Jost is originally from the US, where he began to grow orchids when he was 12 years old. He studied physics and math, but was always dreaming about tropical biodiversity, and soon began to work as a guide and nature photographer in Mexico, Costa Rica, and eventually Ecuador, where he put down roots in 1994. As he explored the Ecuadorian Andes he began to discover many new species of orchids, most in areas that were not protected by national parks or reserves. Eventually Lou and his friends felt a responsibility to protect the things we had discovered, so in 2006 they formed the EcoMinga Foundation to begin building large reserves to protect these strategic biodiversity hotspots. This work continues. Lou has also have worked on the mathematics for describing biodiversity and genetic diversity, and on the statistics of the fossil dates used to calibrate molecular phylogenies. (Spoiler alert: older nodes are most likely to be twice as old as the current publications suggest!)

Contact: Lou Jost loujost@gmail.com
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ecominga/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/ecominga_foundation
Website: https://ecomingafoundation.wordpress.com/

Marco Monteros is an environmental engineer and a member of the Fundación EcoMinga and the Reserve youth council: The Youth Land Trust. As a technical and scientific member of the Fundación EcoMinga, Marco’s work is focused on the conservation and study of orchids of the cloud forests of northwestern Ecuador.

Sebastián Vieira, a naturalist and engineer, grew up surrounded by orchids and has been exploring the mountains  of Colombia with his father and friends to see and photograph orchids in nature. He has discovered and described a number of new orchid species and in 2016 joined a group of conservation oriented people to establish SalvaMontes, a non-profit ONG dedicated to the conservation of nature and biodiversity. Currently, SalvaMontes protects 1,300 acres of cloud forests in a highly biodiverse hotspot in the northern tropical Andes where several locally endemic and threatened orchids are protected. Sebastian is the Executive Director of the ONG and is also a member of the Colombian Plant Specialist and Orchid Specialist groups of the IUCN.

Contact:  sebastian@salvamontes.org
Website: www.salvamontes.org
Instagram: @salvamontescolombia
Facebook: https://fb.com/salvamontesco
www.sebastianvieira.com
Instagram
Flickr
Species Orchidacearum
https://www.speciesorchidacearum.org/orchids

Marta Kolanowska is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Lodz (Poland) as well as a researcher at the Global Change Research Institute (Czech Republic). Her research interests include orchid diversity and evaluation of the impact of global warming on the ecological niches of orchids. She has described more than 350 new orchid species, mostly from South America.

As the President of the Biodiversitatis Foundation she launched the founding of the private reserve called La Palma, located in the Sibundoy Valley, Colombia. La Palma protects the unique orchid flora of this area.

Contact: biodiversitatis@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marta.kolanowska.7
Biodiversitatis Foundation website
http://www.biodiversitatis.com.pl/menu_eng