Erik Leonard Ekman | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | October 14, 1883 |
| Died | January 15, 1931 (aged 47) |
| Nationality | Swedish |
| Occupation(s) | Botanist, explorer, geographer, naturalist |
| Years active | 1914 - 1931 |
| Known for | Describing several new species of Cuban and Hispaniolan flora/fauna |
Erik Leonard Ekman was a Swedish botanist and explorer.
Erik Leonard Ekman was born into a low-income household with five children on October 14, 1883. Due to economic difficulties, the family moved to the central-Swedish town of Jönköping when he was eleven and a half. Here, while at school, his passion for botanical collecting started. He was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1907 at Lund University in southern Sweden and was offered free passage on a ship to Argentina with a Swedish shipping company. He spent three months in Misiones collecting plants, aided greatly by the local Swedish colony. While there, he was offered a position as the Regnellian amanuensis at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, which he gladly accepted. He started his service at the museum in 1908. Thanks to financial support from the Regnell fund, he was able to travel widely through Europe and study with many of the prominent botanists of the time.
Ekman presented his doctoral dissertation at Lund in 1914. In the same year, he was to participate in the third Regnellian expedition to South America. His goal was Brazil, but Ekman was given an assignment from professors Ignatius Urban (from Berlin) and C. Lindman (from Stockholm) to make short stops on Cuba (one month) and Hispaniola (eight months), to collect specimens for Urban's Symbolae Antillanae botanical project. Ekman agreed to do so, but under protest. His trip to Brazil was further delayed for two years by the onset of World War I, political unrest in Haiti, and a plague epidemic in Cuba.
Ekman landed in Havana in 1914 and, except for a short visit to Haiti during 1917, remained in Cuba for seven years. After serious disagreements with (and pressure from) the Swedish Royal Academy of Science in Stockholm, Ekman returned to the island of Hispaniola in 1924 and is credited with having discovered hundreds of new species during his 7-year stay there. [1] He collected in southwestern Haiti's Massif de la Hotte in and around present-day Pic Macaya National Park from December 1926 to January 1927 with Henry D. Barker, and again in September 1928. He collected in the Massif de la Selle on several occasions in 1917 and in the 1920s. [2] He collected primarily in Haiti from 1924 to 1928 and in the Dominican Republic from 1928 until his death in Santiago de los Caballeros on January 15, 1931, at the age of 46. He died from influenza after having been battered and weakened by pneumonia, bouts of malaria and black water fever. He never returned to Sweden after having left it for the second time.
Ekman was interred in Santiago de los Caballeros, where a plaque was erected in his honor by the Dominican government and the American Society of Plant Taxonomists on October 14, 1950. [3]
Ekman contributed to the knowledge of the Caribbean flora more than any other previous scientist. He described more than 2,000 species new to science (a great many of which are now named after him); this was remarkable, since by then the flora of the Caribbean was considered to be extensively documented. His collections are still actively used in the research on the West Indian flora. He collected around 36,000 numbers, amounting with duplicates to more than 150,000 specimens. The Haitian species collected and documented by Ekman were mostly described by Ignatius Urban or by Urban and Ekman. Ekman's published account and unpublished field notes provide detailed descriptions of the flora of the Selle and Hotte massifs as they existed in the 1920s. [2] Ekman also made some geographical discoveries: he mapped several mountains of Haiti and was among the first to measure accurately the highest Dominican (and Caribbean) mountain, Pico Duarte. Ekman also collected birds, mammals and reptiles, of which several species bear his name, e.g. the Hispaniolan nightjar (Antrostomus ekmani). There are also streets in both Santiago and Santo Domingo bearing his name. In Cuba, a special department in the Botanical Garden that is named after Ekman contains plant species related to his work.
The Swedish Foundation Instituto Ekman was established in 1991 in his honour. The aims of the Foundation are to intensify the scientific and cultural exchange between Sweden and the Caribbean countries.
An in depth biographical work on Ekman by Thomas A. Zanoni (New York) and Roger Lundin (Sweden) is ongoing.[ citation needed ]
The genera Ekmanochloa Hitchc., Ekmania Gleason, Ekmaniocharis Urb., Ekmamnianthe Urb., Myrtekmania Urb., Manekia Trel. Ekmaniopappus Borhidi and Elekmania B.Nord. were named for him.
B. Nordenstam & K. Oldfeldt Hjertonsson Plantae Ekmanianae Atlantis, Stockholm, 2007.
The Republic of Haiti comprises the western three-eighths of the island of Hispaniola, west of the Dominican Republic. Haiti is positioned east of the neighboring island of Cuba, between the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean. Haiti's geographic coordinates are at a longitude of 72° 25′ west and a latitude of 19° 00′ north.
Pic Macaya National Park is one of two largest national parks of the Republic of Haiti. It is located in the country's southern peninsula, within the Massif de la Hotte. Featuring the country's last stand of virgin cloud forest, it encompasses more than 8,000 hectares. Elevations in the rugged park reach a maximum height of 2,347 meters above sea level at Pic Macaya, the second highest point in Haiti behind Pic la Selle. A majority of the park is composed of two tall peaks: Pic Macaya and Pic Formon.
Plinia is a genus of flowering plants in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae described by Linnaeus in 1753. It is native to Central and South America as well as the West Indies.
Pic Macaya is the second-highest mountain in Haiti, rising to an elevation of 2,347 metres above sea level. It is located in the Massif de la Hotte, 36 kilometres northwest of Les Cayes and 195 km (121 mi) west of Port-au-Prince. The mountain is located in the Pic Macaya National Park.
The spiny giant frog or Norton's robber frog is a species of frog in the family Eleutherodactylidae. It is named after James W. Norton who accompanied Albert Schwartz in his 1974 expedition to Hispaniola and collected the holotype.
Eleutherodactylus oxyrhyncus is a species of frog in the family Eleutherodactylidae. It is endemic to Hispaniola and known from the Massif de la Hotte and Massif de la Selle, occurring in both the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The common name is rednose robber frog.
The Tiburon Peninsula, or The Xaragua Peninsula, simply "the Tiburon", is a region of Haiti encompassing most of Haiti's southern coast. It starts roughly at the southernmost point of the Haiti-Dominican Republic border and extends westward near Cuba, forming a large headland. Three of Haiti's ten departments are located entirely within the region. They are the departments of Grand'Anse, Nippes and Sud.
Ginoria is a genus of plants in the family Lythraceae. It contains 13 species which are native to southern Mexico and the Caribbean.
Ignatz Urban was a German botanist. He is known for his contributions to the flora of the Caribbean and Brazil, and for his work as curator of the Berlin Botanical Garden. Born the son of a brewer, Urban showed an interest in botany as an undergraduate. He pursued further study at the University of Bonn and later at the University of Berlin where he gained a doctorate in 1873. Urban was appointed by A. W. Eichler to run the Berlin Botanical Garden and supervised its move to Dahlem. He also worked as Eichler's assistant on the Flora Brasiliensis, later succeeding him as editor. In 1884 Urban began working with Leopold Krug on his Puerto Rican collections, a collaboration would later produce the nine-volume Symbolae Antillanae, one of his most important contributions, and his 30-part Sertum Antillanum. Urban's herbarium, estimated to include 80,000 or more sheets, was destroyed when the Berlin Herbarium was bombed in 1943, during the Second World War.
The Massif de la Hotte is a mountain range in southwestern Haiti, on the Tiburon Peninsula. About 2.5 million years ago, Massif de la Hotte was separated from the Massif de la Selle by a deep, wide sea channel, and formed a separate island. This resulted in a hotbed of endemism in la Hottes bird, plant, and reptile communities. The Massif de la Hotte is subdivided into the Oriental la Hotte in the East, the central la Hotte and the Occidental la Hotte on the Western tip of the Tiburon peninsula. The Occidental la Hotte is relatively remote and is one of the most biologically diverse and significant areas of all of Hispaniola. It also supports some of the last stands of Haiti's dense cloud forest on its peaks.
Frère León was a French-born Cuban botanist and De La Salle Brother. Born Joseph Sylvestre Sauget in Arbois, Jura, León was an important contributor to the botanical exploration of Cuba and co-authored, with Frère Alain, the five-volume Flora of Cuba which remains the standard reference on the topic.
Ornithidium donaldeedodii is a species of orchids "discovered" in April 2010 when DNA analysis showed that a wrongly labeled orchid at the University of California Botanical Garden in Berkeley, California, was actually a distinct new species. The "new" orchid, which had been mislabeled as Maxillaria croceorubens since the 1990s, was named after orchidologist Donald D. Dod (1912–2008), who collected the specimen in the 1980s in Haiti. The new orchid was officially described in Lankesteriana, an international journal on orchidology, by authors James Ackerman of the University of Puerto Rico and W. Mark Whitten of the Florida Museum of Natural History.
The wildlife of Haiti is important to the country because of its biodiversity. According to the World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Haiti is considered to be "one of the most biologically significant countries of the West Indies". With an estimated 5,600 plant species on the island of Hispaniola, some of which only occur in Haiti, 36% are considered as endemic to the island. A mountainous area country, it is situated in the western three-eighths of Hispaniola and shares a border with the Dominican Republic. There are nine life zones, from low desert to high cloud forests, as well as four mountain ranges, and hundreds of rivers and streams and the coral reefs in the seas that surround the islands. Issues of environmental damage, expanding population, deforesting and erosion are of concern; less than 2% of the original forest remains on account of deforestation. This degradation is traced from the 17th century to 19th century starting with the French colonization of the Haiti and population explosion during the 20th century and for the purpose of forestry and sugar-related industries, degraded the forests. and the environment.
Haiti National Trust is an international, non-governmental, and non-profit environmental organization dedicated to protecting the biodiversity of Haiti. The Haiti National Trust seeks to establish more protected areas, including national parks, and to stop the destruction of forests, which is the primary cause of species loss in Haiti. The trust also advocates protection of the country's fragile coral reefs and coastal ecosystems. It was founded in 2015 by Philippe Bayard, president and founding member of the Audubon Society of Haiti, and S. Blair Hedges, Laura H. Carnell Professor and director of the Center for Biodiversity at Temple University.
Guilandina is a genus of flowering plants in the legume family, Fabaceae. It belongs to the subfamily Caesalpinioideae and tribe Caesalpinieae.
Rhytidophyllum leucomallon is a species of plant in the family Gesneriaceae, endemic to Hispaniola. According to Liogier it can be found in the Dominican Republic and in Haiti.
Samuelssonia is a monotypic genus of flowering plants belonging to the family Acanthaceae. It has only one known species, Samuelssonia verrucosa, a small tree which grows to 5 meters tall which is native to the Massif de la Hotte in Haiti.
Magnolia ekmanii is a species of plant. It is listed as critically endangered by the IUCN.
Frodinia tremula is a species of plant in the family Araliaceae. It is a scrambling tree endemic to the island of Hispaniola.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Other | |
