24 Arnoldia 78/3 « February 2021 
the environmental and socioeconomic impacts 
of the dam, during their visit to the Nakai Pla- 
teau in August 2007. One of the members, the 
American conservation biologist Lee Talbot, 
joined me on a tour of this newly discovered 
mai hing sam stand. Nothing seemed to come 
of the visit, however, and unfortunately, I didn’t 
find anything about the trees in the panel’s next 
report.® I proposed to my contacts at NTPC to 
collect as many seeds as possible and try to 
propagate and grow more trees. NTPC thought 
it was a great idea and gave us the go-ahead. 
Developing a Restoration Protocol 
At the time, mai hing sam had never been suc- 
cessfully propagated from wild-collected seed. 
As a result, several critical facts about resto- 
ration protocol were unknown to scientists: 
What time of the year do the seeds mature in 
the mountains of Laos? How long is their seed 
viable? Do they produce seeds every year? Did 
we need to treat the seeds before sowing them? 
Under what conditions would they propagate 
and survive? What we did know was that all 
conifer seeds are wind dispersed, so we hypoth- 
esized that their dispersal is probably connected 
to the windy part of the year, which occurs 
toward the end of the monsoon season. 
Our first challenge was logistical: how would 
we collect seeds from cones high in the cano- 
pies, sometimes one hundred or more feet high. 
Maxwell—who, by this point, had returned to 
Thailand where he lived—often hired local tree 
climbers to make collections. But this method 
requires low branches or woody vines grow- 
ing up the trunk, as the climbers do not use 
any specialized equipment. We put our heads 
together and came up with an unusual plan. 
We placed large tarps under the trees and hired 
boys with slingshots to shoot rocks up into the 
canopies of the trees so that the seeds would 
fall onto the tarps. We tried this method, and 
miraculously it worked. We got thousands of 
cones and hundreds of thousands of minute 
winged seeds. 
The next challenge was to clean and propa- 
gate the seeds. This process was not managed 
by a conifer expert like Philip Thomas, as I had 
hoped. Rather, NTPC hired a commercial con- 
tractor to propagate the seeds in a local nursery. 
The contractor had no familiarity with this 
sensitive species, and only twelve seedlings 
germinated. Of those, only four grew to matu- 
rity. In restoration and horticultural propaga- 
tion, this rate is not considered successful, but 
it was a Start. 
In 2008, NTPC planted the four trees at the 
confluence of two small streams behind the 
house occupied by the director of the Water- 
shed Management and Protection Authority. 
This area was somewhat protected and easy to 
monitor, although soil characteristics were not 
similar to the natural conditions of the peat 
swamps in which the trees naturally grew. In 
2015, when I first observed these trees, they 
were about six feet in height, and on my last 
expedition, in January 2020, they had reached 
over sixteen feet. The key to the survival of 
these four trees, I believe, was sustained high 
soil moisture during their establishment period 
and protection using sturdy exclusion fencing 
to fend off the cattle and water buffalo that 
munch on the succulent foliage. 
Threats to Wetland Habitat and 
Endangered Species 
After my contract was completed in 2009, I 
returned to California, where I became an assis- 
tant professor at the University of San Fran- 
cisco. I vowed to go back to look for more mai 
hing sam in the Nakai-Nam Theun National 
Protected Area. Southeast Asia is experienc- 
ing rapid habitat loss, biodiversity declines, 
and risk of species extinction primarily due to 
unsustainable harvesting of forest resources and 
conversion for agriculture. Lack of enforcement 
and pressure to develop rice paddies has led to 
the decline of wetland habitat and continued 
poaching in the protected areas.” Nearly every 
species of softshell turtle, terrapin, or tortoise 
is threatened with extinction. Populations of 
exceptionally rare species, such as the saola, 
are too low and fragmented to be viable.!° Con- 
sidering these threats, I knew that we needed 
to mount a concerted effort to document and 
conserve mai hing sam in the region. 
Phil Rundel, who had first encouraged me to 
participate in the project in Laos, recommended 
that I apply for National Geographic funding. I 
spent two years getting collaborators on board 
