This award to Dr. Charles Peters, Curator of Botany in the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden, supports the PI's student, Ms. Selena Ahmed, to conduct doctoral dissertation research in Yunnan Province, China to document the relationship between the management of tea systems and biodiversity at landscape, plant species, and genetic levels. Ms. Ahmed will be supervised in Yunnan by Professor Chunlin Long, Head of the Research Group for Biodiversity and Plant Resources at the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her study will measure biodiversity of traditional tea agro-forestry systems, wild tea populations, and modern tea plantations of Yunnan along three dimensions: (i) floristic composition and structure, (ii) morphological, genetic and secondary metabolite diversity of cultivated Camellia sinensis var. assamica and wild tea species (section Thea) and, (iii) local ecological knowledge and management practices of tea stewards. A primary aim of the proposed project is to disseminate research results to local tea-growing communities and land-use organizations to facilitate the conservation of the biological and cultural resources linked to tea resources grown and consumed globally.
