A Neotropical Savanna

We “blitzed” two sites in Panama. At the first site we made a checklist of plants, insects, and birds. At the second we counted trees and shrubs and made a grid map of the plants. I’ll look at the similarities and differences in plants at the two sites and then I’ll present the data that are unique to each site.

I like to start a report like this with a sense of where we are. Here’s a Google Earth snapshot of Panama with the two sites nearly overlapping. If you can barely make this out, click on the image for a larger view.

Once it’s clear that we’re in Panama, the second most important piece of information is that we’re on the side of a mountain, Volcan Baru.

The dark green and brown area in the upper left portion of the image is Volcan Barú. Site 1 (BioBlitz Panama 1) is a wooded area at an elevation of 1128 meters, and Site 2 (BioBlitz Panama 2) is an abandoned pasture, now mowed, at an elevation of 737 meters.

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Note: This plant was identified faster than I would have believed possible by Nuytsia (blog, Flickr photos), based on his examination of the images I posted at Flickr. Thanks, Nuytsia!

I found this plant growing in the understory of a planted pine forest. I don’t know whether it strictly fits in the “neotropical savanna” category, but I found it so curious that I wanted to identify it. The red parts reminded me of the wax lips we used to be able to buy as children.

Recently, a visiting botanist reminded me of the value of learning plant families well. If you can get at the family, then you have a much better chance of learning the genus and species. This is a viewpoint I learned in my very first botany book, Botany in a Day, by Thomas Elpel, but I had drifted away from that approach, mostly because I was finding a habitat-organized book quite useful. If it didn’t serve me, though, I was basically stumbling around with each new plant, trying to find pictures in books or images on the web to steer me in the right direction.

So, this time, I’m taking the family point of view to work through the features of this plant. Psychotria poeppigiana, commonly known as “Hot Lips,” is a member of Rubiaceae, the coffee family.

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