Tropical biologist Vojtěch Novotný’s research forays into Papua New Guinea

For a quarter of a century, Prof. Vojtěch Novotný has been monitoring and helping discover the biodiversity of Papua New Guinea’s tropical rainforests. The Czech researcher founded the Binatang Research Centre, which now has fifty employees and is a haven for researchers from all over the world. He has two dozen research projects to his name, including establishing the largest biological research site in the Pacific.

Right after dawn, a 4WD vehicle equipped with, among other things, an alarm button that deactivates the engine in case of danger and sends information about its location to an armed security service, drives out of the town of Madang on the coast of Papua New Guinea. The goal of its crew, which has a whole day of travelling through mountain passes and serpentine roads ahead of them, is to reach the slopes of the highest mountain in the country, Mount Wilhelm (4,509 metres above sea level), where Vojtěch Novotný from the Biology Centre of the CAS is conducting international research.

More species of trees and shrubs grow on one single hectare of the New Guinea forest than in the whole of Central Europe. “This is one of the few areas where it is still possible to study the diversity of seemingly endless forests rather than just isolated forest patches in the midst of plantations. Where else can you wander through 500 kilometres of uninterrupted tropical rainforest? Apart from New Guinea, you’ve got the basins of the Congo or the Amazon River – that’s it,” Vojtěch Novotný remarks.

Inland, a police van escorts the team as it carries the wages for dozens of indigenous workers for three months of research assistance. At the bank, Novotný withdrew roughly half a million CZK in the local currency comprising bags of coins and small bills, since people in the rainforest do not usually have change at their disposal. The indigenous peoples helped map the composition of tropical vegetation and herbivorous insects at eight sites, ranging from 200 metres above sea level to the tree line found at 3,700 metres.

“Papua New Guinea is one of the few tropical regions in the Old World that has high mountains, which provides an excellent opportunity for research, for example on how plant and insect communities will regroup on mountain slopes as the climate changes,” Novotný explains.

In 2021, Vojtěch Novotný received an Academic Award (Praemium Academiae) from the Czech Academy of Sciences, constituting generous financial support for his research. (CC)

An unexpected new currency
In a single day, the off-road Landcruiser drives through several locations where people speak different, mutually unintelligible languages. In Papua New Guinea, this linguistic diversity is as fascinating as the biological one; just nine million people speak a total of 850 languages. Across tribal boundaries, the lingua franca used is the English-based creole language Tok Pisin (sometimes referred to as Pidgin).

In New Guinea, researchers need not only the approval of the government, but also of the eight tribal chiefs on whose lands the research is taking place. The indigenous peoples are the real owners of the rainforests. “Papua New Guinea is one of the few countries in the world to recognise traditional tribal land ownership. As a result, seventy percent of the country is still covered in rainforest today and most of the forests are in good condition,” the biologist adds.

Research teams are almost always welcomed by Papua New Guineans, as their presence usually marks an interesting, prestigious visit, and one that brings income. The problem then is not in getting approval, but rather in dividing the limited amount of work among as many interested clans and tribes as possible and figuring out how to pay them. Villagers do not own bank accounts and usually do not even need cash – they live off what they grow. Ready money for paying the weekly wages of a large number of people would make the research team a magnet for robbery. That’s why the researchers decided that instead of cash, each worker would receive a receipt at the end of the week with their name, the date, and the amount earned. The receipts are then redeemable for cash at the end of the research project.

After three months, the time to get paid had come. But when the car with the cash and the police security arrived at the agreed locations, it was apparent that things had not gone quite as originally planned. A total of about two thousand receipts had been issued, one equivalent to 250 CZK on average. Novotný expected long queues of dozens of employees with several receipts each. They did show up, but so did additional numbers of people in each village, presenting dozens or even hundreds of receipts bearing the names of employees.

Cashing wage receipts on Mount Wilhelm

The researchers had reported in advance that receipts would be paid out to whoever brought the receipts, regardless of name. This was the only possible solution, since few people in the rainforest have ID cards. However, it turned out that many workers did not want to wait for payment and started using their receipts as payment in village shops. Shop owners were happy to accept them, but only at a discounted value, allowing them to make a profit once they cashed in the receipts themselves.

The receipts were circulated as payment in the wider region between villages. A few villagers who had cash at home even turned into bankers overnight and bought up the receipts, sometimes for as little as 70% of their original value. Eventually, about half of all receipts ended up in the hands of a few individuals. “We had inadvertently created a whole new currency, and with it a social class of bankers emerged quite spontaneously. It was an unplanned social experiment completely outside of our intended research of the ecology of tropical forests,” Novotný summed up the situation.

Complex research efforts in the rainforest
Panama, Guyana, Cameroon, and Vietnam – Novotný’s work has taken him deep into the forests in various corners of our planet. But his second home has become Papua New Guinea. For a quarter of a century, he has been spending half of his year on the exotic island – the other half in České Budějovice, where he works at the Institute of Entomology of the CAS and lectures at the Faculty of Science of the University of South Bohemia.

What first brought the entomologist to the island was his university research in 1995 of herbivorous insects living on tropical trees. He started out with his internship at the American, privately funded Christensen Research Institute on the coast near Madang. But after a mere two years, the Christensen family shut down the institute, and all affiliated researchers ended up leaving the country. However, Novotný and his team decided to take the unusual step of setting up their own research station on the other side of the bay.

The New Guinea Binatang Research Centre started out as five employees in the abandoned family house of a former coconut plantation caretaker. Gradually, it grew into an internationally renowned institution with 50 staff members and a wide range of ecological research, spanning from plants to insects to vertebrates. The New Guinean colleagues make it easier to navigate the world of tribal politics, and many have become exceptional experts on local flora and fauna. Researchers and students from abroad, in turn, enrich research efforts with new methods and ideas regarding ecology.

In its beginnings, the expeditions to Papua New Guinea were still an adventure. “Choosing this location for research was unusual not only for the Czech Republic, but also for tropical ecologists from other countries. Back then, getting to the island was neither cheap nor easy, but over the last 25 years, international travel has become much easier,” the biologist recalls.

To date, ecologists at the Binatang Centre have completed two dozen research projects, including revising the estimate of the global number of insect species from thirty to a whopping five million, or comparing the ecology of trees and their herbivorous insects in forests on every continent – from the tropics of Papua New Guinea, Cameroon, and Panama to the temperate climate of the USA (the state of Virginia), Japan, and the Czech Republic (southern Moravia).

They also established the largest botanical research site in the Pacific spanning fifty hectares, where they have long been monitoring the fate of 288,000 tagged, numbered, and mapped plants. One of the research focuses is on how the forest is responding to climate change. The area also provides answers to the question of how up to several hundred tree species can survive together over the long term, with none of them dominating the others. “It’s difficult to study rare species that you only come across once during a day’s work in the forest, which is why we need a big enough site where we can monitor thousands of trees,” Novotný says.

A delicate matter
Selecting a site for such an expensive and long-term project of an expansive botanical area was no easy feat. Once a site is established, it cannot be moved. “You find yourself at the mercy of tribal politics, which you don’t always understand well. It can be a very delicate matter,” Novotný explains. The village of Wanang was the only one in the broader area which did not give permission for logging in its forests and instead was interested in establishing a nature reserve. Working at a botanical site is an ideal source of income that goes hand in hand with nature conservation. “Wanang has a very charismatic leader, Filip Damen, who has gotten the entire village on board with his vision for forest conservation, and our project has shown the villagers that it was the right decision.”

The beginnings of research in the village of Wanang, field laboratory in 2003

Novotný’s team already had ten years of experience working in Wanang before it established the research site. The botanical site can be reached from the village after half a day’s walk along forest trails and across several river fords. Novotný therefore needed to set up his own research station. The large British company Swire contributed to its construction, which saw forest conservation in Wanang as an opportunity to counteract their own shipping and air traffic greenhouse gas emissions.

The construction materials for the three buildings were transported to the site by heavy-lift helicopters, while solar power is now supplied by a system financed by Albert II, Prince of Monaco, who had visited the station and stayed overnight in a room since known as the royal suite. As soon as the helicopters appeared over Wanang, the inhabitants of the surrounding villages working with the loggers knew that this time, the competition for the prestigious project would be won by the Wanang conservationists. “When someone logs trees, mines for gold, or grows rice, it makes sense. But when someone marks dozens or hundreds of thousands of trees with tags, it is a completely mysterious activity for the villagers, which is hard to explain,” Novotný notes.

The team set up a research site on Filip Damen’s land and got to work: to mark all the trees and shrubs on the fifty hectares of forest that have a stem or stalk more than one centimetre thick. Each one must be traceable in the forest, so it was necessary to chart an accurate topographic grid within a rectangle one kilometre long and half a kilometre wide. This took a whole year.

The next big challenge was identifying the species. Botanists in the Czech Republic distinguish species mainly by their flowers and fruits, but in the tropical rainforest, it was necessary to identify young trees or, conversely, giants, whose flowers are high up in the canopy and inaccessible. “The tropical botanist must learn to recognise trees by their foliage, bark, and other markers even in the sterile stage without flowers or fruits. There are no books for this; what’s important is fieldwork on the ground,” the biologist explains.

Botanist Kenneth Molen measuring trees at the research site.

Over 280 thousand trees and shrubs at the botanical site belong to 550 species. Several talented young men from Wanang, trained in botany and able to identify all these species on the ground, were involved in taking their inventory. Each tree was marked with an aluminium tag with a serial number, tied to a thin copper wire. In total, 1.5 tonnes of tags and fifty kilometres of wire were needed. The whole operation took the team of thirty people two years to complete.

“The inventory of the entire site is revised every five years. As of 2022, we have already completed the second one and are raising money for a third. It’s a never-ending job – the longer the time frame for observation we have, the better. Trees die and new ones appear, and the ideal would be to keep it going until most of the trees in the forest under observation have grown under our supervision, but we still have a long way to go,” Novotný explains.

Open Science
The Wanang research site is part of the international ForestGEO network. It monitors large forest areas in the tropics and smaller, typically 20-hectare plots in less diverse temperate forests. The ForestGEO consortium now includes 73 sites from 28 countries, with one Czech plot in the Žofín Forest. Together, researchers have approximately seven million trees of 12,000 species under their supervision – one fifth of all global tree species. “This is probably the most successful international collaboration in the field of ecology, not least because the individual teams retain their independence and cooperate mainly by sharing their methods used to investigate their plots,” Novotný says.

The Papua New Guinea site is also significant because it is the only one in the Pacific that lies east of the Wallace Line, which separates the fauna and flora of Asia and its islands from the Sahul, i.e., today’s land masses of mainland Australia and New Guinea. The line follows an area of deep ocean that, even at low sea levels during the ice ages, isolated Sahul from the rest of the world, resulting in its unique biome.

Today, the inhabitants of Wanang village have no doubt that their decision to offer their land for research purposes was the right one. In addition to new jobs, the researchers have helped them build a primary school in the village, which is now attended by nearly two hundred children, and a new medical centre which, thanks to the purchase of several thousand pills of antibiotics and antimalarials, is the only well-stocked one within a thousand square kilometres.

The Binatang Research Station

“One of my goals is to build a domestic academic scene for ecological research in Papua New Guinea, which is not easy,” Novotný reveals. Higher education is not readily accessible, with less than five percent of young people completing it. It is also very expensive, including tuition fees equivalent to 60,000 CZK a year. As a result, many talented children end up not receiving higher education.

Some college graduates are sponsored by their extended family or even their entire village, which then expects the educated individual to be of benefit for the whole settlement. But the expected usefulness of a student certainly does not anticipate their subsequent career in scientific research, which means additional years of graduate and postgraduate studies followed by a job that is difficult to explain. “The aspiring researcher is under a lot of pressure from their relatives, as they do not tend to understand the importance of additional studies beyond the already barely affordable undergraduate degree. For them, a doctorate is something beyond usefulness. After all, it’s highly probably they’ve never met anyone with a PhD degree before,” Novotný explains. Students travelling to the Czech Republic for education, especially to the University of South Bohemia, have also encountered this problem.

Despite the complications of tribal rule, occasional conflicts between the locals, high crime rates, tropical diseases, and the lack of roads and other infrastructure, the Czech ecologist has been piecing together the complex puzzle of life in the diverse ecosystems of Papua New Guinea for more than a quarter of a century. Novotný has been carefully and systematically collecting data that might one day enable us to understand the complex outcome of millions of years of biological evolution on our planet.

You can find this article (in Czech) in the current issue of our A / Věda a výzkum magazine. All issues (Czech only) are available for free online on our website.

1/2022 (version for browsing)
1/2022 (version for download)

Text: Zuzana Šprinclová, Division of External Relations of the CAS
Photo: Jana Plavec, Division of External Relations of the CAS, archive of Vojtěch Novotný

Texts and photographs labelled (CC) are released for use under the Creative Commons license.

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