Silence,
Here are the problems with trying to determine the range of any orchid species. Few, if any of the old collection data has correct locations cited. This is because collectors fiercely protect their collection sites, to guard against another collector finding and taking ‘their’ sources of livelihood. Some are close (but HOW close, who knows?); some are listed as coming from a completely different country. I, myself, listed P. celebesense as coming from a place a long way away from where I found it. This was an attempt to divert further collection, yet still give a general area description.
When I was in Bogor, in 1978, I photographed every Paphiopedilum herbarium sheet, and found very conflicting data on a great many of them. Many of those sheets were wrongly identified, had only a few words to explain a few basic requirements, and because of the location in Java, who knows how much useable data remains of that material. The director told me that the Japanese destroyed the entire contents of the herbarium during WWII, so we are left with a lot of missing data.
A person could spend a lifetime trying to locate every habitat of a single species, and then I am certain, he would miss a large number of them. Also, all this hype about species being wiped out, like those from Vietnam for example, is pure BS. I can assure you, that I could go there right now and find truckloads of any species given that pronouncement. Even Cribb has now said, “So far orchid species do not seem to have been exterminated in the quantities predicted some years ago”(P.Cribb,
www.kew.org/herbarium/orchid/ORN35/intro.htm). I have seen places, in Hong Kong and in Borneo, where local species have returned a year or so after being “wiped out” in particular locations. This is not to say that forest habitats are not being destroyed, and eventually many of them will be, but the reality of life is, it is next to impossible to actually destroy a single species of anything. Don’t forget just how small those orchid seeds are.
Your quote:
“I believe situations with conflicting data are the ones where a bibliography is crucial. That data has to be interpreted and the reader may want to analyze the original data to understand why the author has reached his/her conclusion.”
Unless you personally see every herb sheet yourself, in every herbarium, this will never happen. Also, the only information you will ever get from Kew is their own ‘interpretation’ of data from their vast collections of herb sheets…and you will never see those sheets.
There are some things we will never know, unfortunately, and it is frustrating to accept this realization.
As far as information I put in my new book, most of it gives habitat description in a way that does not pinpoint exact locations. Even still, I know collectors in SE Asia who continue to send their collectors into a particular area, searching for particular orchid species, and they will just keep searching until they find it. But this is really a good thing, actually, (one recently re-discovered the long-lost habitat of P. lawrenceanum). I have a whole lot more faith in the ability of commercial orchid collectors to propagate, and to vastly increase their numbers, and to ‘save’ any orchid species from the possibility of becoming ‘wiped out,’ than I do in the CITES dictate that prevents us from going into the jungle and salvaging those habitats under pressure. But my book is about all the ‘stuff’ that happens when you go out into the jungle and may not be exactly what you might have in mind about descriptive orchid habitats.
Lance