BIOTROP collaborated with the Ecological and Socioeconomic Functions of Tropical Lowland Rainforest Transformation System (EFForTS) Project to conduct a Tropical Plant Identification Workshop on 11-15 September 2017 at its headquarter in Bogor through the expertise of five taxonomists from the Kew Royal Botanical Gardens of the United Kingdom.

Twenty-one herbarium and botanical garden staff and environmental researchers mostly from the collaborating institutions of EFForTS Project who needed to enhance their knowledge and skills in morphological plant identification attended the workshop.  The EFForTS Project is a collaboration between University of Goettingen and three Indonesian universities, namely: Bogor Agricultural University (IPB), University of Jambi, Tadulako University and the Indonesian Institute of Science. Other partner-institutions that were invited to join the workshop were BIOTROP, Harapan Rainforest, Universitas Papua and the Indonesian Institute of Life Sciences.

The participants learned about the morphology and tools in identifying 38 tropical plant families from the collection of BIOTROP, IPB and Cibodas Botanical Garden herbaria. Through short illustrated lectures and extensive hands-on practical sessions, the Kew’s botanists demonstrated to the participants the key characters for each family. Participants visited the Bogor Botanical Garden to apply in the field the knowledge they gained from the classroom sessions.

The workshop’s resource persons were Dr Timothy Utteridge, Dr Andre Schuiteman, Ms Alison Moore, Ms Renata Borosova, and Ms Lesley Walsingham from Kew and Dr Katja Rembold from EFForTS Project. Dr Rembold also served as workshop coordinator together with Dr. Sri Sudarmiyati of BIOTROP.

The workshop was funded by the German Research Foundation/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DGF) in context of the EFForTS Project with contributions from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD, in the framework of the collaboration “Biodiversity education and assessment in the South West Pacific”) and BIOTROP.