Nicolai Vavilov was a celebrated plant explorer whose greatest contribution lay in discovering where plants had their origins. But he was not by any means the only plant explorer.

A modern-day plant explorer. David Williams specializes in finding the wild relatives of peanuts (groundnuts, to much of the world). Here he pauses in the Bolivian Amazon with his ever-present field book to write notes on where he's been and what he has found. (Photo courtesy of David Williams)

We may think of the world as a place that’s been completely explored, a globe that holds no new surprises, no secrets. If we did, we’d be terribly wrong. Even today, there are explorers and collectors scrambling through forests and farmers’ fields, wetlands, and remote mountaintops and valleys, and sometimes tiny villages on market days, looking for growing plants that might someday help humankind enjoy better lives.

The Amazonian forests, as practically everybody knows, are full of plants and animals and microscopic organisms that humans haven’t even named yet. Any reasonable person can tell you that the rain forest must be preserved so that the species within them can be protected. Somewhere in there, the argument often goes, there may be a cure for cancer. (Actually a promising treatment for cancer has been found, and it was in a forest, but it was a cool forest far from the Amazon. See the forthcoming section on Biodiversity and health.)

It’s more difficult to imagine that there are potentially important food plants out there in the forests, much less the steep hillsides of the tropics and the unforgiving sandy soils of the dry belt. But there are.

Not every discovery is exciting and earthshaking. But every day of the year, an uncounted number of germplasm explorers is tromping through the boondocks, armed with small cloth sacks and plastic bags, magnifying glasses, compasses, maps that are often incorrect, notebooks, and enough knowledge of what they are seeking to fill an encyclopedia. And they continue to bring back seeds and plant tissues that, they hope, will do a better job of feeding the world. Television, satellites, and air travel may have shrunk the world to what we think of as manageable size, but it’s not so small yet that the plant collectors have nothing left to collect.

A constant need.
As we have seen, science and industry have a constant need for “new” germplasm. The wild and weedy relatives of crops that are considered commercially important, like the wheat we use to bake our bread, and maize, and rice, may contain genes that can improve the yield of their domesticated cousins, or perhaps give food crops the resistance to insects or diseases that pesticides once promised but failed to deliver. Collectors seek varieties, too, that seem to do well on degraded land. Why? Foods derived from these species are obviously tough fighters. They survive despite harsh temperatures, too much or too little rain, and other bad conditions, and so they may prove helpful when all the rich, fertile land disappears.

	Tools of the collector's trade: Compass, magnifier, notebook. (Fred Powledge)

And the fertile land is doing just that, as Earth’s ever-increasing population demands more and more room on which to live.

Collectors look for animal germplasm, as well. They have a harder time than plant collectors because the pool of beasts yet to be discovered has become very tiny. The pharmaceutical industry is vitally interested in germplasm that may be used in creating new drugs. There is demand, too, for plants that are useful as animal forage, fuelwood, or stabilizers of land. Curiosity about the unexplored variety of life in the topmost reaches of forest canopy, for instance, has inspired scientists to hang in nets suspended from dirigibles so they can study the canopy from above

There is always the possibility that germplasm exploration will reveal wholly new foods (or, more likely, ancient foods that the modern world forgot in its rush to standardize on wheat, rice, maize, and a few other crops) that will help feed a vastly more populous world.

To many people, especially those who go to the movies a lot and have seen the “Indiana Jones” films, the image of a plant collector is of a swashbuckling person, more adventurer than scientist, who must contend with giant leeches, entire quarries full of snakes, numerous bad guys, and, usually, a bit of cannibalism before finding the elusive miracle plant (and, of course, the perfect girl- or boyfriend). Of course, it isn’t that way in reality, although the location of most expeditions is the most humid, warm, tropical, and less-populated zones of the earth. That, after all, is where so much of the biological diversity lies. And, if plants are to be found with genes that harbor natural resistance to insects, weeds, or diseases, they are most likely to be found in their centers of origin, many of which lie in the belt of forest, marsh, mountain, and savanna that exists between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, those imaginary lines that encircle Earth at 23.5 degrees above and below the Equator..

You can click the links below to glimpse the lives of some of the more interesting of our modern plant collectors. After you’ve read a link, just click the “Back” button on your browser to return to the list and meet another explorer, or to move on to the amazing story of the maize that everyone thought was lost, but wasn’t.

Next: The maize that wasn't lost — Agriculture home page — Glossary — Site map
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