Celebrating Teddy Roosevelt's Hawai'i environmental vision

There's been a lot of media attention in recent weeks to President's Bush's claiming his environmental credentials in naming three new marine national monuments in the Pacific, but few remember that President Teddy Roosevelt went there first.

Long before it was the popular thing to do.

And a century earlier.

(Image: A fairy tern nests in an old ironwood tree at Midway Atoll. Photo: Jan TenBruggencate.)

One hundred years ago, Roosevelt established the Hawaiian Islands Reservation, protecting the reefs and birdlife of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands—that more than 1,000 miles of islands, shoals and reefs that extend west-northwest of Kaua'i and Ni'ihau.

The reservation eventually became a national wildlife refuge and later part of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument. The specks of land in this region of the Pacific are, from east to west, Nihoa Island, Necker or Mokumanamana Island, French Frigate Shoals, Gardner Pinnacles, Maro Reef, Laysan Island, Lisianski Island, Pearl and Hermes Atoll, Midway Atoll and Kure Atoll.

Millions of seabirds breed and roost on these islands. Their reefs and sandbars are home to breakthtaking arrays of marine life, many species unique in the world.

The history of the place is mysterious, sad, tragic and uplifting. Early Hawaiians lived here and left plenty of archaeological records, but they had abandoned the islands by the time of Roosevelt's declaration.

Dozens of shipwrecks are have been located here, dating back to the whaling days of the early 1800s. Feather collectors slaughtered tens of thousands of seabirds—one of the reasons Roosevelt acted to protect the place. Ill-considered introductions of alien species like rabbits wiped out much of the native life on land.

There are stories galore.

It's hard to get out to the islands, but the centennial of Roosevelt's designation will be celebrated next week at the nearest road-accessible National Wildlife Refuge, the one at Kīlauea Point on Kaua'i. There is more than just a proximity connection. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands refuge was once administered from Kīlauea Point, where shortwave radio traffic with the remote islands was handled.

On Tuesday, Feb. 3, staffers from the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument will give presentations every half hour from 1 to 3:30 p.m. Authors Mark Rauzon (Isles of Refuge: Wildlife and History of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands) and artist Patrick Ching (several wildlife books and numerous wildlife prints) will autograph their works.

“I still remember working in what is now the contact station – the small building next to the lighthouse – waiting for radio calls with Tern Island,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staffer Noreen Bautista. “We worked in shifts, and often had contact only at night. During the summers we also talked with crews working on Laysan Island.”

In a press release issued by the service, its superintendent for the Papahānaumokuākea monument credited Roosevelt.

“This centennial offers us an opportunity to celebrate the many years of conservation that have preceded us and the current work ongoing within the Monument to protect its natural and cultural resources, as well as to look toward the future. We are honoring the foresight of President Roosevelt in setting aside this remarkable place, and we are acknowledging our responsibility and privilege to inspire future generations to continue that mission.”

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

JF Rock's 1913 Hawaiian must-read now on Google Books

One of the most remarkable volumes in Hawaiian botany, Joseph Rock's “Indigenous Trees of the Hawaiian Islands,” is now available on the Web.

The 1913 compendium is full of photographs and descriptions. If you love Hawaiian history, vivid description and Hawaiian trees "Indigenous Trees" is a necessity.

The book is available in a couple of locations, including Google Books and at the Internet Archive's American Libraries site. Links at the bottom of this article. (A comment from a reader, seen below, led me to update the post with the American Libraries link.)

The photographs are stunning, although not well reproduced by Google Books. They are, however, good enough to encourage people to visit their local libraries to view them in the original. The text is compelling, describing a Hawaiian landscape quite different from what we see today, and adding amazing bits of information, like the role of human disease on the decline of the native palms. More on that later.

Rock, a famed Hawai'i explorer, ethnographer and botanist, explains his goal in the opening words:

“It has long been the writer's desire to give to the public a volume on the native trees of Hawaii, giving popular as well as technical descriptions of the trees peculiar to Hawaiian soil.

“At first it was thought that plain popular descriptions would suffice, but it soon became evident that the technical part could not be dispensed with, and in order to make the book valuable for both the layman and the scientist, it was therefore included.”

Rock worked the Hawaiian forests early enough that he was discovering new stuff all the time, and he notes that his book added an entire genus, 22 species and a pile of varieties of Hawaiian plants.

The book is useful in numerous ways, but is valuable in part because Rock uses the Hawaiian names as well as English and Latin monikers.

And it is useful to see what the impact of a century is on the landscape. The Austrian Rock was working in the Hawaiian Islands from his arrival in 1907, at age 23, onwards. He later left the Islands to spend his mature career of more than 25 years in China—where he wrote books, dictionaries and much more. He returned to Hawaii after World War II and died here in 1962.

Worldwide, his is most famous for his China work, but in Hawai'i, he has been seen as one of the seminal botanists, an explorer and chronicler without peer, and among the first to produce a volume that was useful to and understandable by the lay reader.

He worked in a time when much of the lowland area of Hawai'i was still being converted from native forest to plantation agriculture and other kinds of development. And grazing animals had not yet destroyed many of the older stands of native trees. Today, when people want to be in a largely native forest, they head into the uplands. That wasn't necessary in Rock's time.

“...each island, with the exception of Kahoolawe, and also Niihau, has its peculiar leeward lower forest flora, which is in all cases richer in species as far as tree growth is concerned than the rain forest,” he writes.

But the decline was happening as he worked.

“On Kauai, the dry or mixed forest zone has almost entirely disappeared and only a few trees can still be found. Most of the land has been cleared for sugar cane fields up to an elevation of nearly 2000 feet; above Makaweli only little is left, while above Kekaha only grass land spreads up to an elevation of nearly 3000 feet,” he writes.

Rock starts with a detailed description of the individual islands and forest zones, and then switches to detailed plant descriptions. Within his texts are intriguing tidbits. For instance, he says the native fan palm, loulu, was used to weave “excellent hats.” But he said disease made it difficult for residents to climb the trees, so they chopped down the palms to get at the leaves.

“It may be stated that excellent hats are made from the young fronds by the natives. This, however, has caused much havoc; the present generation, being more or less afflicted with the hookworm, finds it easier to cut the palms down rather than climb them for the single young frond necessary for a hat,” he writes.

Hookworm infections were once common in many parts of the world. The disease caused anemia, weakness and fatigue, but rarely death. The parasite has largely been eradicated in many parts of the world, and drugs are available to cure infections. Global hookworm eradication programs were being launched about the time Rock published “Indigenous Trees.”

The original 1913 volume went out of print, but was reprinted by Charles E. Tuttle Co. in 1974. It is again out of print, and used copies are being sold as antiques. It has 548 pages and 215 large photographic plates.

It's a big file on Google, but you can read it on the web or download it to your own computer here. The Internet Archive American Libraries site seems to have better quality on the photographs. It's here.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Merging technology with biology

Lasers are useful as pointers in public meetings, for aiming weapons, for directing energy and for many other purposes—but they also can play an important role in biology.

Increasingly, biologists are employing the most complex technologies available, and merging multiple technologies to accomplish things that were never before possible in the natural sciences.

In a recent example on the Big Island, scientists from the U.S. Forest Service and Carnegie Institution combined high-accuracy GPS, plus advanced spectral imaging, with distance-measuring lasers to measure large-area changes in the natural landscape.

The equipment was mounted in aircraft, and permitted a three-dimensional detailed look at the forest cover.

A report on the project was published this month in the journal Ecosystems, under the title, "Environmental and Biotic Controls Over Above Ground Biomass Throughout a Tropical Rain Forest.” The combined airborne technology is called the Carnegie Airborne Observatory. More on that here.

The satellite-based positioning inherent in GPS tells researchers precisely where on the ground they're looking. The laser, which can measure distances with six-inch accuracy, tells them the relative heights of various parts of the canopy, creating a three-dimensional image. The spectrometer can be used to distinguish individual plant species from each other—a koa tree has a distinctly different light signature from an 'olapa, for example.

By assessing the forest while flying over it, vast regions can be cataloged quickly. And preliminary results—comparing the aerial imagery with information gathered by foresters trudging through the woods on the ground—show that it works.

"These findings showed airborne data correlated with data derived from study plots on the ground," said Forest Service ecologist and paper co-author Flint Hughes, of the service's Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry.

The researchers did more than just mapping. Their work was able to show that areas dominated by alien plant invaders had different amounts of biomass than those that were primarily native—and that a native forest is better at sucking up and storing carbon dioxide than an alien-dominated one.

"Our results clearly show the interactive role that climate and invasive species play on carbon stocks in tropical forests, and this may prove useful in projecting future changes in carbon sequestration in Hawaii and beyond," said co-author Gregory Asner, of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology.

For the research leading to the paper, the researchers flew their aerial observatory over Mauna Kea's northeast flank, covering the Hawai'i Experimental Tropical Forest, a site that is a candidate of the National Science Foundation for designation as a part of the National Ecological Observatory Network.

The work observed the diameter of trees, the height of the canopy and allowed calculations of the biomass present in the forest. In a press release, the authors said that “study results suggest fast-growing invaders decrease biomass levels, while slower-growing species increase biomass stocks.”

The Nature Conservancy is using similar technology on Kaua'i, working with Dana Slaymaker of Resource Mapping Hawai'i to collect detailed imagery from aircraft of the Alaka'i region. One key difference between the two systems is the kind of spectral data collected, and its level of detail.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Obama inaugural quotes

“ We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil,”--President Barack Obama.

(This is the new president's official photograph, which you'll soon see on federal office building walls, on official documents and elsewhere. By new White House photographer Pete Souza.)

From the perspective of the RaisingIslands site, here are some key quotations from President Barack Obama's inaugural address.

“...each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.”

"With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet."

“Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

“Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”

“This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions — that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

“...we will act — not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.”

“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

“Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.”

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Garden center is Hawai'i's latest LEED green building

The National Tropical Botanical Garden's new building, which houses its library, herbarium and research areas, is now certifiably the greenest building on Kaua'i, and one of the most environmentally sensitive in the state.

(Images: Botanical Research Center photo by Jon Letman, NTBG. The LEED Gold logo is owned by the U.S. Green Building Council.)

The garden's Botanical Research Center has been granted LEED Gold certification, the first Kaua'i structure to receive any rating under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system.

The building was designed and built to achieve the LEED standard. It stores rainwater from its roof, has a photovoltaic system, includes natural lighting to reduce the need for electric lights, uses reclaimed materials, has drought-tolerant landscaping to reduce irrigation needs, its walkways are permeable concrete to reduce storm runoff, and there's even an electric car recharging station.

“LEED is a whole new way of looking at construction, how we use resources and reduce associated waste. The implications go far beyond the building itself and have the potential to influence people in all spheres,” said NTBG Director and Chief Executive Officer Chipper Wichman.”

The LEED certification requires an extensive audit, and the notice of the Gold standard award comes nearly a year after the blessing for the building, which is actively in use.

The center, which will be dedicated as the Juliet Rice Wichman Botanical Research Center, was designed by architect Dean Sakamoto and built by Unlimited Construction Services, Inc.
For more information, see the garden website .

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate