By Sampreethi Aipanjiguly
It was the 38th of almost 50 days in the field for the team from the Ethnobotanical Society of Nepal (ESON), who were surveying plants in the remote areas of Ilam and Panchthar districts in eastern Nepal on the foothills of the Kangchenjunga mountains.
They had been working for almost 5 hours that day, starting at 8 a.m.
Since a visit to the sacred pond Timbu Pokhari was planned for the day, the surveyors were fasting. From their night’s camp in Ghumne (4,100 m), the pond was a couple of hours’ walk away. A light rain was falling and the temperature read 5°C.
“We prayed at the pond and when returning back switched to an alternative track leading to fairly remote terrain at over 4,300 metres altitude. It was there that we saw, standing a metre tall with its flower bracts, already a dried bright orange, the Rheum nobile,” said Dr. K.K. Shrestha, describing the moment when the team first saw the endangered plant species.
For Dr. Shrestha, a veteran ethnobotanist, this was a joyous moment; he was seeing the plant, locally called "kenjo," in the wild for the first time in 25 years.
Later on they saw a few more plants scattered around, but that first sighting was unforgettable. Moments such as these gave the ESON team the boost to carry on its work of inventorying plants and identifying them.
Planning a plant survey expedition is no easy task. The area where ESON was working is remote and takes about a week to access. Plant collection expeditions are organized in the monsoons when the flowers are in bloom aiding identification. However, the monsoons are a difficult period in the Nepal mountains. There are no roads, only walking trails that are slippery with mud and infested with leeches. It rains every day and the team has to regularly battle strong cold winds. 
The absence of motorable roads means that all equipment – for the kitchen, for collecting and drying plants, for sleeping – has to be carried by yaks or porters. For long periods of time, the team has little contact with other people since there are no tourists or trekkers or villages here.
Rice and lentils make up every meal, although with a wide smile Ripu Kunwar, a member of Dr. Shrestha’s team, remembers the day the team had a sweet treat – kheer, a type of rice-pudding made with Chauri (female yak) milk. Ripu’s passion for plants helped him surmount the difficulties of field work, he says.
Describing his 7 weeks of surveying plants, Ripu Kunwar said that on a typical day, the team walked 4-5 hours covering about 5 kilometres. Each day 5-8 quadrat plots of 10m x 10m were inventoried along 100 metres to the right and left of the walking trail. Two separate teams worked each plot, one collecting plants and the other inventorying. Each evening the day’s collection of plants was dried over coal in a stone hearth that the team built.
Dr. Shreshta remembers their last plant collection expedition, which ended disastrously when the drying tent caught fire. At the time the team was using standard drying equipment that is used by plant collection teams everywhere, but a strong wind blew the inner tent in and the fire caught destroying a portion of the plant samples. Following the incident, the team experimented with drying on stone hearths. The team often worked until 1-2 a.m., knowing that their day would start at 6 the next morning.
The ESON team brought back 600 plant samples of about 300 species, of which half have been identified at the species level and a quarter at the family or genus level. The remaining plants are undergoing identification.
For the organization, inventorying is just the first step in the process to identify high plant biodiversity areas. Through its work, the team has found that Jamuna VDC, one of the villages of Ilam district in eastern Nepal is an important area as is Falaincha VDC in the Panchthar district.
In these areas, ESON will look into involving the local communities in plant conservation. Training workshops for local people have already been organized to demonstrate research methods and results, and to hear villagers’ experiences on the management and use of plants.
“Our work does not end with identifying and naming plants. We now have the huge task of talking to the local communities here about the importance of conserving plants and working with them on the issue,” says Dr. Shrestha.
ESON’s work in the Pancthar and Ilam districts of eastern Nepal took the team to altitudes ranging from 1,600 metres to 4,400 metres. They observed that at 1,600-2,500 metres, the community-managed forests, although few in number, are in good condition.
The remaining forests here are considered no-man’s land and there is little government control. Temporary seasonal shelters have been put up, at altitudes ranging from 3,000-4,000 metres, for grazing yaks and sheep. Here there are signs of overgrazing, loss of trees for firewood and poaching of wildlife.
The team sees the removal of the cattle shelters, the provision of sources of alternative fuel and the handing over of unmanaged land to communities as solutions to the problems of plant conservation that the area faces.
Sampreethi Aipanjiguly is the regional communications officer for the CEPF coordination team in the Eastern Himalayas. The team is led by WWF, the global conservation organization.