9413146 Ward This award provides funds to permit Dr. Jerome V. Ward, Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT), to make a short-term visit to the Philippines to finalize plans with Dr. Lolita J. Bulalacao, Botany Division, National Museum, Manila, for cooperative research on vegetation and climatic history of the Philippines. During the three-week visit, the collaborators expect to (1) establish personal links for future collaboration and experimental design and (2) collect and analyze field samples in order to demonstrate that the project has sufficient scientific merit to justify support of a future cooperative research proposal. The collaborators expect to address several open questions for a paleoecology study. This preliminary research and the larger project on tropical palynology, to follow, will provide new insights into Late Quaternary environmental change and vegetation instability, Holocene plant species migrations and population expansions, and prehistoric human impacts on the tropical forests. The present project is ancillary to the Flora of the Philippines Project (supported in part by NSF Grants No. INT- 9320518 and INT-9442970) which is surveying the remaining native forests, cataloging all vascular plant species, and documenting the plant diversity in the Philippines. The PI and his Filipino collaborator are well trained in this field of research. This project is relevant to the objectives of the East Asia and Pacific Program which seeks to increase the level of cooperation between U.S. and East Asian scientists and engineers through the exchange of scientific information, ideas, skills, and techniques and through collaboration on problems of mutual interest and benefit. ***
