{"id":199328,"date":"2015-08-13T13:53:30","date_gmt":"2015-08-13T16:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=199328"},"modified":"2015-10-08T14:20:36","modified_gmt":"2015-10-08T17:20:36","slug":"tracing-the-footsteps-of-saint-hilaire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/tracing-the-footsteps-of-saint-hilaire\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracing the footsteps of Saint-Hilaire"},"content":{"rendered":"

in Bananal<\/em><\/p>\n

\"The

Illustration: Pindamonhangaba, c.1827, Jean-Baptiste Debret | Photo: Eduardo Cesar<\/span><\/a> The marks of time: at left, forests and mountains of Pindamonhangaba in 1827. Above, eucalyptus trees and an eroded hill on the outskirts of Bananal in 2015Illustration: Pindamonhangaba, c.1827, Jean-Baptiste Debret | Photo: Eduardo Cesar<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe region is becoming increasingly mountainous. The road is flanked by very dense virgin forest; in some places it is becoming quite rough and difficult to negotiate\u201d
\n<\/em>–\u00a0Saint-Hilaire, April 25, 1822<\/em><\/p>\n

Vilmar da Silva, a businessman from the Brazilian city of Bananal, found it strange when he spotted from his car a fiftyish gray-haired man who looked like a foreigner. The man had climbed up a steep bank and was holding onto a shrub at the entrance to Silva\u2019s small farm on Tropeiros Highway, the old Rio-S\u00e3o Paulo road. But the tension soon dissolved. Marc Pignal, a French botanist from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, had only climbed up the bank to collect a specimen from a plant that had caught his attention. It was nine o\u2019clock on the morning of June 9, 2015, the first day of an expedition to trace the S\u00e3o Paulo portion of a trip that French naturalist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire made to the area in March and April of 1822.<\/p>\n

\"In

EDUARDO CESAR<\/span>In the field: Gaglioti collects branches from a tree…EDUARDO CESAR<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Four botanists spent five days perusing sites, starting from the area around Bananal, on the border between the states of S\u00e3o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, to Mogi das Cruzes, in the S\u00e3o Paulo metropolitan region\u2014some of which had changed considerably while others still looked preserved when compared with Saint-Hilaire\u2019s records, published in the book Segunda viagem do Rio de Janeiro a Minas Gerais e a S\u00e3o Paulo <\/em>[Second trip from Rio de Janeiro to Minas Gerais and S\u00e3o Paulo]. In many cases the changes were significant, but neither Saint-Hilaire nor the botanists on the June expedition yielded to nostalgia. Although he was fascinated by the tropical flora, the French naturalist anticipated that the forests might disappear and give way to progress and civilization. \u201cHe thought about development alternatives for Brazil, based on ideas from the French Revolution, and he had a utilitarian view of space,\u201d says S\u00e9rgio Romaniuc Neto, a researcher at the Botanical Institute of S\u00e3o Paulo and leader of the expedition.<\/p>\n

Funded by the Institute and the French government, the trip is part of a plan to reclaim the work of Saint-Hilaire in Brazil, coordinated by Romaniuc and Pignal. Romaniuc became familiar with Saint-Hilaire\u2019s field notebooks and Brazilian plant collection at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, where he did his doctoral research from 1996 to 1999. In an effort to bring this material back to its home country in image form, he implemented a cooperation agreement between the museum, the Botanical Institute and the Reference Center on Environmental Information (CRIA) in Campinas, and he was among the coordinators who assembled a virtual herbarium<\/a>\u00a0that includes the notebooks and some 9,000 records of plants collected by Saint-Hilaire (see Pesquisa FAPESP <\/em>Issue n\u00ba\u00a0229<\/em><\/a>). When the virtual herbarium went online in 1990, Romaniuc and Pignal, who coordinates the museum\u2019s virtual collection, began to plan trips to retrace the routes taken by the French naturalist. This was the first one. The next trip, scheduled for October 2015, will take them from France to northern S\u00e3o Paulo State, Itapeva, and on to the south.<\/p>\n

Just before he reached the entrance to the Joana D\u2019Arc farm as the field work began, Romaniuc stopped on the side of the road to peruse the landscape. \u201cIt\u2019s a beautiful forest, but it\u2019s not primary anymore,\u201d he explained, pointing to one of the stands of trees amidst pastures and areas of eucalyptus and bamboo. \u201cThere are no more large trees. There are firetrees, which are large, but they too are part of the secondary vegetation, and they grow and die quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt looks like there are no native species anymore,\u201d Pignal said as he came down from an embankment. \u201cMaybe none have been introduced,\u201d comments Marc Jeanson, coordinator of the French national herbarium at the museum in Paris, as he collects a branch from a shrub of the genus Mimosa<\/em>. Dotted along the edges of the road and the forests were many simple yellow flowers of bitter melon (Momordica charantia<\/em>), of no importance to the botanists\u2014\u201ca sign of plant globalization,\u201d Jeanson points out. The forest they were examining occupied what is now a defunct coffee plantation, noted Silva, who owns the farm. The forest is at least 60 years old, he said, because it was already there in the 1950s when his family bought the land. \u201cIt\u2019s still preserved just like it was,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\"...

Eduardo Cesar<\/span>… pressing the specimens…Eduardo Cesar<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Diversity<\/strong>
\nBefore continuing on to the city, Silva walked over to a neighboring farm and pointed to a river, narrowed to a stream, that passed beneath the highway. It was almost completely covered over by Surinam grass, an exotic species adopted as cattle feed because of its low cost. \u201cThe Carioca River here used to have fish, but now they\u2019re gone.\u201d On that day and the next, Romaniuc saw rivers that Saint-Hilaire had described as generous in size, now transformed into timid streams covered by earth that slides down from the hills, which are more susceptible to erosion because of the pastures.<\/p>\n

On April 25, 1822, as he approached what was then the village of Bananal on his way from Minas Gerais to Rio de Janeiro, Saint-Hilaire, anxious to return to Paris because of his ailing mother, wrote in his diary, \u201cThe region is becoming increasingly mountainous. The road is flanked by very dense virgin forest.\u201d Nearly 200 years later, the botanists confirmed that the mountains are clearly still standing, but the older forests have become sparse, particularly along roadsides.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve lost biodiversity due to uncontrolled agricultural development, which has swept aside any concern about environmental balance,\u201d said Romaniuc late on the morning of the first day. \u201cWe can\u2019t imagine Saint-Hilaire at time zero,\u201d observed Pignal, who has been traveling to Brazil since 1993 and was in the city of Salvador the previous week. \u201cWhen he was in these parts, there was already deforestation, sugarcane and grazing.\u201d When he arrived in the town of Areias, now a city of 4,000, Saint-Hilaire noted the diversity of the landscape: \u201cThis intermixture of coffee plantations, virgin forests, cornfields, shrub vegetation, valleys and mountains, these ranches, these shops, these small dwellings surrounded by black people\u2019s shacks, and groups of travelers coming and going\u2014together lend this region the appearance of great variety.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Pignal,

Eduardo Cesar<\/span>Pignal, on an embankment with JeansonEduardo Cesar<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Saint-Hilaire arrived in Rio de Janeiro in the company of the French ambassador in 1816, and before coming to this region he had previously traveled around the states of Rio, Minas Gerais, northern and southern S\u00e3o Paulo, Mato Grosso, Esp\u00edrito Santo and the southern states, in addition to Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay. Other Europeans were also exploring Brazil on their own expeditions during that time. Botanist Carl Friedrich von Martius and zoologist Johann von Spix, both German, explored extensively from S\u00e3o Paulo to Amazonas from 1817 to 1820. Soon after, between 1822 and 1829, Russian-German Baron Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff traveled through several states with a team of 39 including a botanist, a physician, an astronomer, and artists. Saint-Hilaire explored the countryside of Minas Gerais with Langsdorff, later writing, \u201cIn the company of Langsdorff, the most active, indefatigable man I\u2019ve ever met in my life, I learned to travel without wasting a single instant, to subject myself to all manner of hardships, and to suffer cheerfully through every kind of discomfort\u201d.<\/p>\n

Traveling with a team of only seven assistants, the French naturalist took note of the expansion of coffee-growing in the region. He wrote the following about Bananal, which then had just a single road: \u201cIt will probably soon become important, because it lies in the midst of a region where coffee is widely grown and whose inhabitants, therefore, have considerable income.\u201d Because of the coffee plantations, which occupied what had been forests, Bananal and neighboring cities prospered for several decades, but they subsequently declined when the coffee plantations moved to other fertile lands. Today these cities provide a modest living based on tourism. In the words of one resident of Bananal, the younger ones leave to pursue an education, the older ones leave for jobs, and a few women stay to teach school to the children. Several historic buildings from the coffee era still remain (see Pesquisa FAPESP<\/em> Issue n\u00ba\u00a0232<\/em><\/a>), as well as bits of forest, some of which are protected by the Serra da Bocaina National Park.<\/p>\n

\"088-093_Saint<\/a>A large wolf apple <\/strong>
\nAndr\u00e9 Luiz Gaglioti, a botanist studying several plant groups from Saint-Hilaire\u2019s collection as part of his postdoctoral research at S\u00e3o Paulo State University (Unesp), used the opportunity of a layover with the group to investigate a pasture behind the farm\/hotel where they were staying. \u201cI saw on Google Earth that there\u2019s a forest over here,\u201d he said. He was disappointed at first when he found that the forest consisted mostly of bamboo and had no scientific interest, but after half an hour\u2019s walk, they came across a strip of forest alongside a tank that holds water for cattle, at the top of a hill. \u201cIt was this one. Small, but it should have some interesting things.\u201d<\/p>\n

There they found a tree from the botanical family Anacardiaceae, which also includes mangos and cashews. It looked typical of the region\u2014and therefore was probably, at last, a native species\u2014so they collected a branch for more detailed identification in the laboratory. Adjacent to a pasture, they collected parts of a shrub known as a wolf apple (Solanum lycocarpum<\/em>), inexplicably much taller and with larger fruit than the shrubs of the same species in the Cerrado savannah of central Brazil.<\/p>\n

The collected plants were organized at the end of each day, placed between newspaper pages and pressed between sheets of cardboard. They would later be identified in the laboratory and compared with the ones collected by Saint-Hilaire, to give a comparative look at the species in that area 193 years ago versus today. In late July 2015, the botanists\u2019 preliminary analysis confirmed that, like the French naturalist in 1822, they had found an earpod tree (Enterolobium contortisiliquum<\/em>), a candeia<\/em> (Moquiniastrum polymorphum<\/em>) and a shortleaf fig (Ficus guaranitica<\/em>), but no jequitib\u00e1 <\/em>(Cariniana estrellensis<\/em>), Cattley guava (Psidium cattleianum<\/em>) or Brazilian sassafras (Ocotea odor\u00edfera<\/em>), all typical of the Atlantic Forest and reported by Saint-Hilaire, and this reinforced their hypothesis on loss of biodiversity.<\/p>\n

\"A

Eduardo Cesar<\/span>A preserved spot: the church of Nossa Senhora da Escada, in GuararemaEduardo Cesar<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Over a period of six years in Brazil, Saint-Hilaire accumulated nearly 2,000 species of birds, 16,000 insects, 120 mammals, 35 reptiles and 76,000 plants, of which 4,000 have yet to be described. In 1816, soon after arriving in Brazil, the French naturalist was the first to describe yerba mate (Ilex paraguariensis<\/em>), on a farm near the city of Curitiba, and the pequi tree (Caryocar brasiliense<\/em>), in Minas Gerais. Upon returning to France, he published the three-volume book Flora Brasiliae Meredionalis<\/em>, in which he described the plants he had collected in Brazil.<\/p>\n

An unexpected forest<\/strong>
\nLate on the first day, the botanists unexpectedly identified a preserved strip of forest on a hill next to the highway from Bananal to the nearby city of S\u00e3o Jos\u00e9 do Barreiro. \u201cIt\u2019s similar to the ones that covered the hills and valleys in this region 200 years ago,\u201d Romaniuc said. \u201cOver there in the middle is a Cecropia hololeuca<\/em>, a tree that grows in mature ombrophilous (rain-loving) forests, and down here near the road there\u2019s a Cecropia pachystachya<\/em>, which is typical of areas that have been undergone more change.\u201d The former species is also called silver cecropia, for the color of its leaves, which at the time had red flowers, and the other is called white cecropia. The two trees stood out in the forest because of their thin trunks and leaves shaped like an open hand.<\/p>\n

\"Flower

Eduardo Cesar<\/span>Flower and fruit of a wolf apple shrub (Solanum lycocarpum<\/em>)Eduardo Cesar<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

From Bananal, Saint-Hilaire went to Rio de Janeiro and was dazzled by the landscape there. \u201cThere is perhaps nothing in the world as beautiful as the environs of Rio de Janeiro,\u201d he wrote. \u201cVirgin forests as old as the world display their majesty before the doors of the Brazilian capital.\u201d Out of convenience, the botanists on the June expedition went in the opposite direction. On Wednesday, June 10, they left Bananal, traveled through S\u00e3o Jos\u00e9 do Barreiro, Areias and Silveiras, crossed Dutra Highway, reached Cruzeiro and continued on to a valley in the Mantiqueira Mountains called Garganta do Emba\u00fa, on the border with Minas Gerais (see map<\/em><\/a>). Further on, in Minas, they reached the well-preserved forests of the municipality of Pouso Alto, where Gaglioti found Myriocarpa stipitata<\/em>, a rare tree species of the Urticacea family with flowers simpler than those of the nearby species.<\/p>\n

Saint-Hilaire arrived in Pouso Alto on March 12, 1822, having sent an assistant ahead of him to introduce himself to the comandante, <\/em>the town\u2019s highest official, and obtain a place to sleep that night. The comandante <\/em>was not available, so it was the vicar who examined his documents, and then proceeded to take leave without offering the desired resting place. \u201cSo we were obliged to seek out a secluded corner in a small shop, where they gave me a filthy room full of fleas. At night we witnessed a tremendous brawl between mulattos,\u201d he wrote. Nor did the children escape his ethnological perspective. Upon passing through the town of Taubat\u00e9 on March 26, he wrote: \u201cIn nearly every house one can see children who are quite beautiful, but that changes by the time they reach the age of 12 to 15; by then they are thin and sickly-looking, with a cadaverous, earthen color, no doubt from a poor diet and unhealthy or insufficient food.\u201d<\/p>\n

Botanist Renata Scabbia, a professor at the University of Mogi das Cruzes, joined the group on June 11. Together, they explored the Itapeti Mountains, a 5,300-hectare (53 square-kilometer) forested area partially occupied by farmers and residents of outlying neighborhoods. On the next morning, the last day of the trip, they traveled around the outskirts of Mogi das Cruzes under a light rain. \u201cThis area still has many elements of the original biodiversity, but they are losing out to expansion by the outlying neighborhoods,\u201d Romaniuc observed.<\/p>\n

\"and

Eduardo Cesar<\/span>Red cecropia (Cecropia glaziovii<\/em>)Eduardo Cesar<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The next stop was at the church of Nossa Senhora da Escada, on a square in Guararema, which had been an Indian settlement before the time of Saint-Hilaire\u2019s visit. \u201cThere are so few left here today that I haven\u2019t seen a single one, in either the city or the surrounding areas,\u201d he wrote. He was also struck by the poverty of the place: \u201cMost of the houses are built around a square, and you can tell how poor it is from the fact that I asked for sugarcane rum at several shops and had no success.\u201d The main square, with a large fig tree, is still there and is surrounded by houses that no longer have the look of poverty.<\/p>\n

Upon arriving, Romaniuc asked several people if they knew anything about the river behind the church. No one had heard anything about the river; it had been covered over, and the site was occupied by several houses. \u201cSaint-Hilaire said he had immense difficulty obtaining information from the residents of the places he found,\u201d he said. \u201cNot much has changed.\u201d Shortly afterward, the botanists returned to S\u00e3o Paulo along a road that was bucolic and tree-lined in the times of Saint-Hilaire but is now completely urbanized\u2014a wide avenue that cuts through the outskirts of Mogi, Suzano, Po\u00e1 and Itaquaquecetuba, then opens onto an extensive slum area to the right as you come into Guaianazes, the first S\u00e3o Paulo neighborhood encountered from that direction.<\/p>\n

Project
\n<\/strong>Saint-Hilaire\u00a0Virtual Herbarium (n\u00ba 2006\/57363-4<\/a>);\u00a0Grant Mechanism:<\/strong>\u00a0Research Grant; Principal Investigator: <\/strong>S\u00e9rgio Romaniuc Neto (Botanical Institute of S\u00e3o Paulo); Investment:<\/strong>\u00a0R$160,123.56 (FAPESP).<\/p>\n

Book<\/em>
\nSAINT-HILAIRE, A. Segunda viagem do Rio de Janeiro a Minas Gerais e a S\u00e3o Paulo<\/strong>.<\/em> Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia, 1976, or through Brasiliana Eletr\u00f4nica<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Botanists retrace Auguste de Saint-Hilaire expedition","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[152],"tags":[206,213,224],"coauthors":[5968],"class_list":["post-199328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospect","tag-biodiversity","tag-botany","tag-ecology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199328\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199328"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=199328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}