Taiwan Today

Taiwanese civil servant Jing Zeng knew from the start that Ralf Knapp was a bit different. Zeng met the German engineer eight years ago while on a mountain climbing trip in the Austrian Alps with a club of Taiwanese and German mountaineers. She says, for example, that he turned up for the mountaineering expedition in a racy Porsche 911, but in the seat next to him was not a sexy girl but a stack of newspapers—useful for collecting plant specimens. In the evenings on the hikes, while the rest of the party kicked back and unwound, Knapp sat by himself reading botanical treatises. “Everybody said he was crazy,” she laughs, remembering. “They asked him, ‘Why do you love plants so much?’ They couldn’t understand.”

Neither could she, really, but she did have an appreciation for the beauty of plants as part of her overall interest in hiking. And she came to admire Knapp for his enthusiasm for his hobby. “I really envy him,” she admits. “I think it’s always a good thing when someone has a positive hobby, when they are full of passion.” Still, as far as ferns go, she says, “I’m interested, but maybe not so interested.” She married the German anyway, and became his valued research assistant as the two began to explore Taiwan’s natural world together.

Ralf Knapp’s passion for botany came long before his arrival in Taiwan in 1998 on what was initially planned as a three-year work contract for a German technology firm. Although Knapp, 42, is an electrical engineer by trade, preferring “to have a stable and reasonable income,” he says he has always loved studying plants. He says that as a teenager growing up in Baden-Wuerttemberg, southwest Germany he spent as much time as possible outdoors investigating the natural world, and even as a first lieutenant in the German army would take leave to do botanical field research.

His passion continues to this day and has led him to spend the last seven years exploring Taiwan, cataloguing thousands of samples of virtually all of the island’s some 700 fern species. From the peaks of Yushan, or Jade Mountain, to the outlying islands to his own neighborhood in Muzha, southern Taipei, Knapp has sampled and studied, picked and photographed them all, in the meantime creating his own herbarium, or plant collection, and a substantial database. But most impressively, particularly for an amateur, he has assembled all of this knowledge into a volume, Ferns and Fern Allies of Taiwan, a 1,000-page, 2.2-kilogram compendium that researcher F.W. Li of Duke Univer-sity describes in the peer journal Taxon as “breathtaking” and “a remarkable contribution to our understanding and appreciation of the Taiwanese pteridoflora [ferns].”

Experts in Taiwan have been equally impressed. Peng Ching-i (彭鏡毅), curator of the Herbarium, Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taipei (HAST) and a research fellow at the center, says Knapp’s work is an invaluable contribution to botanical research in Taiwan and is all the more remarkable because it is the work of one person. “He is an inspiration to all researchers in Taiwan,” Peng declares. Chiou Wen-liang (邱文良), head of the Botanical Garden Division of the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute, says “The comprehensive data, abundant pictures, references to many previously undiscovered taxa, and those unsolved questions addressed in this book will all provide useful information for future studies.”

Knapp did not intend to write a book, and in fact initially did not even have a particular focus on ferns or on Taiwan’s botany. He says that when his company first posted him to Taiwan in 1998, he was far too busy in his job to spend much time on his hobby. He indulged his interest during vacations spent in his native Germany, where field research on the country’s botanical richness consumed most time at home. “I was living the typical life of a Taiwanese engineer—working 60 hours a week and having almost no time for myself or my hobbies,” he says. Zeng encouraged him to focus on his hobby while in Taiwan as a way for him to find a better work-life balance and satisfy his interest.

The idea intrigued Knapp. Taiwan is in many ways a paradise for ferns. Located at the crosswinds of the Pacific Rim, the light reproductive fern spores that blow in from as far off as Indonesia and Japan find Taiwan’s humid subtropical climate and rich soils a welcoming new home. Taiwan’s huge range of topography and elevation—towering mountains nearly 4,000 meters tall rise less than 30 kilometers from the sea—also allows for a huge diversity of species, ranging from the tropical to those with cousins in the peaks of the Himalayas.

More than 700 species of ferns inhabit the island, a number at once large but manageable. “It’s not the tropics,” Knapp says, observing that tropical locales generally host thousands of fern species. Cataloguing the thousands of species in Indonesia, for example, would clearly fall beyond the scope of a single researcher or even a husband-and-wife research team. Still, the number of fern species in Taiwan far outstrips more temperate locales such as Germany or the United States.

Another advantage to doing such a study was the compact size of the island. Knapp notes that doing a similar study in mainland China, for example, would be untenable, as the distances are too vast, especially for an amateur with a full-time job. The majority of places in Taiwan, though, are within driving distance or at most a short flight.

Knapp and Zeng began exploring the island together as a team, and Knapp soon amassed a sizable amount of photographs and samples. He also immersed himself in the scientific literature that already existed, but quickly noticed a paucity of information on the topic in English, while the data that did exist was often outdated, incomplete or otherwise shoddy. The official English-language Flora of Taiwan, for example, was last updated in 1994, and critics contend that much of the research done for it was not up to snuff. Privately, some professional botanists from Taiwan say that much of the work on Flora of Taiwan was simply a matter of “cutting and pasting” from earlier documents, with little new research done to clarify the original work. Knapp says much of the information is incomplete or just plain wrong, with species misidentified, few illustrations and even fewer representative photos to help with identification. The number of spelling and other errors also points to inattention to detail.

Fern “Fairy Tales”

Knapp began investigating local research texts in Chinese and even those from the Japanese colonial era (1895–1945). Assisted by his wife and other researchers, he discovered that much of the earlier data, while often of excellent quality, suffered from a number of deficiencies. Some of the research done under the Japanese administration was out of date, as the current status of many species had not been recorded in decades. He also noted that only a few monographic studies by Taiwanese researchers over the years had been completed, with the researcher running out of time, interest or funding. “I started to realize that there are so many people who had worked on the same questions. They would stop and decades later someone would start again on the same thing,” he says. He also began hearing “fairy tales”—rumors of undiscovered or extremely rare species growing in Taiwan’s deep mountains—that were absent from modern texts.

Enticed by these mysteries, Knapp decided to follow up on them, to update what was already known, investigate lingering questions in the field and perhaps even record a few new species from among the legends. He says he asked himself, “Why not come up with my own opinion … sum it up and put it all on paper?” The idea for the book germinated in his mind, fed by the knowledge that he already had one friend in the publishing business in Germany, who might be able to publish a small text on the cheap. “I thought maybe to write a three- or 400-page book, maybe make 50 or 100 copies,” intended for family and friends, he says. But like a weed in a garden, the idea only grew larger.

At first, Knapp admits, he did not know a lot about ferns as he had previously concentrated on plants in Central Europe, where only a small number of ferns exist, and had a lot to learn. By 2004, however, he had begun to spend nearly every weekend in the field indulging his hobby, first with his wife, then by himself or with other researchers he had met. Soon, both his enthusiasm and his budding project began to gain attention in botanical circles.

Academia Sinica’s Peng confesses he was initially skeptical of the German’s interest when Knapp first contacted him for assistance. But upon meeting Knapp, he was impressed by the engineer’s passion and his breadth of knowledge. “He wasn’t a professional, but he knew lots of data on ferns. And he had more enthusiasm than many professionals in the field,” Peng says.

The realities of having a job meant Knapp could never make it to HAST during working hours, but Peng was so impressed that he eventually gave Knapp a set of keys and 24-hour access to the herbarium, a gamble that Peng sees as paying off handsomely. “Knapp actually donated a lot of his own collection to the herbarium, itself no small contribution to the study of Taiwan’s biology,” Peng says. To date, Knapp has donated more than 1,000 samples to HAST from his collection of some 8,000 specimens.

Peng is just one of the many people who helped Knapp during the writing of the book. For one, Chen Cheng-wei (陳正為), a young field researcher for the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute, accompanied Knapp on many of his expeditions and provided invaluable assistance on some difficult journeys. “I think this guy represents the new kind of field researcher in Taiwan,” Knapp says of Chen. “These new guys, they don’t just stay in the lab looking at someone else’s data—they go out in the field and find the data themselves. They are very strong, very excited about their research.”

A loose clique of botanists soon gathered around the project, many as baffled and amazed by Knapp’s dedication as his wife had become. Even those with no small passion for fieldwork express disbelief at Knapp’s endurance. Chen says that accompanying Knapp in the field was always a challenge, adding that “many people could not keep up with him.”

A recent trip to Dasyueshan (also known as Daxue Mountain) National Forest Recreation Area, in Taichung, central Taiwan is a case in point. The journey involved a 2 a.m. departure from Muzha and a 3-hour drive down the Sun Yat-sen Freeway to the park. By 5:45 a.m., Knapp was already out of the car photographing a fern species he had heard was in the area. A further 19 kilometers along the road—after startling a troop of macaques—Knapp parked the car and trekked into the brush, up a boulder-strewn hillside in search of another rare species, garden snips in an IKEA bag over his shoulder for collecting samples, powerful Nikon camera around his neck to photograph the evidence.

When Knapp is in the field, he is no sightseer, though, and his eyes are trained at ground level to identify the various species he encounters. And, while he is scrupulous in his collection methods, he is not above using the garden snips to clear brush away from a particularly interesting specimen, giving it a higher chance of survival, to “make sure it’s here when I return,” he says.

As ferns are widespread throughout Taiwan, Knapp’s fern hunting takes him all around the island. One weekend he might be searching for a rare species in the highlands of the Central Mountain range, while the next he might be parked on a roadside in New Taipei City investigating the range of a more common species.

Taiwan is well known to field researchers for its dangerous and unstable terrain and Knapp has faced a number of challenges during his research. He has encountered poisonous snakes and insects, landslides and unpredictable weather, which can change in minutes at the higher elevations. He has been sickened twice with scrub typhus, a bacterial infection caused by mites that live in the tall grass of Taiwan’s outlying islands. Potentially fatal if not treated with antibiotics, the disease causes fever, chills and muscle aches. Knapp says that he knows a number of botanists that have been afflicted by scrub typhus and admits the symptoms of the disease “are really painful.” And more than a couple of times, he has found himself lost and unprepared deep in the wilderness.

Still, his passion for field research has not dimmed, and the recent trip to Daxue Mountain had him clambering across a waterfall atop a 10-meter-long waterlogged cedar trunk hanging precariously above river rapids, before he disappeared up a slope on the other side. Committed to discovering whether a particular species actually occurred at the top of the slope, he sent decent-sized rocks tumbling behind him as he climbed up to investigate. After he confirmed that indeed the species did occur in this location, he descended the slope and brought down an amount of rocks and debris that could only be described as a minor landslide. Yet Knapp was unfazed by this brush with disaster, counting it as another day of fieldwork. He finished up the day by returning to his small Toyota and driving at breakneck speed down the mountain and back to Muzha, returning by 8 p.m. the same day he had left. Such hurried trips to likely spots for ferning are typical for Knapp.

Back to the Backcountry

The struggle to bring the book to the public did not end with the challenges Knapp faced in the field. A number of academic publishing houses were contacted to no avail, including the publishers of the Chinese-version of Scientific American. The head of that publishing house in Taiwan, Li Chia-wei (李家維), who is also a professor in the Department of Life Sciences and dean of Tsing Hua College at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, northern Taiwan says the company had to pass as they had no experience in publishing English-language books.

Li Chia-wei did present Knapp’s book to the board of the Dr. Cecilia Koo Botanic Conservation Center (KBCC), however, where he also serves as chief executive officer. The foundation did not have their own publishing arm, but they were very impressed with the book and wanted it to be published. The board initially considered an e-book to defray costs, but soon realized that scientists wanted a “real book.” The foundation then took the audacious step of forming its own publishing firm for the sole purpose of printing Knapp’s work.

The book was no small risk for the new company, as, with some 4,700 full-color photos and more than 1,000 pages, it is a hefty—and expensive—read. Still, the company considered the book to be a unique contribution to the study of botany in Taiwan.

The book finally came out in May 2011 and was well received by the international botanical world. Duke University’s F.W. Li writes that Ferns and Fern Allies of Taiwan “thus offers a comprehensive and up-to-date summary of Taiwanese ferns by … providing identification keys with detailed images of each species.” F.W. Li gushes over Knapp’s copious use of photos to illustrate terminology and fern characteristics, which he calls “an innovative and extremely helpful approach” in guiding people to identify a fern by family, genus and species name. Knapp says he spent a lot of time working out a clear system for species identification, hoping to make the volume as useful as possible for both beginners and experts in the study of ferns. He says he is relieved that others in botany agree.

Knapp’s work has also been reviewed by global botany heavyweight and Royal Botanical Gardens Edinburgh research fellow Christopher Fraser-Jenkins. An early copy of that review, which was scheduled to appear in the Indian Fern Journal in December 2011, praises Knapp’s work as one of the top books on ferns produced in recent years.

With Knapp’s book being so well received, KBCC is already planning on publishing two more books in English for the international market, with one on Taiwan’s famous orchids and one on begonias. “This is all because of Knapp’s book. He is a pioneer for us,” Li Chia-wei says.

Winning over Detractors

Although Knapp is now well known in Taiwan’s botanical circles for his dedication to good, rigorous field work, his zeal in field research has not always endeared him to local professionals in the world of botany. He says at one point he heard whispers that he was there to “steal” Taiwan’s botanical specimens and take them off the island, or that he was stepping on the toes of long-established professionals. At one point, the rumors made him question the whole project. “I was probably in a bad mood for a few days … when discussing this,” he says. But eventually Knapp’s meticulousness and integrity, along with his willingness to share his own research, won him supporters in the botany community.

Knapp says his goal was not just to provide a useful text, but one that would aid conservation as well. He notes that some ferns are so rare they might only exist on a particular hillside in Taiwan’s interior, adding “it’s our duty to preserve these species for future generations.” For that reason, while his detailed descriptions of ferns include locations where populations exist, for very rare species he chose not to reveal precise locations to deter what he calls “sensation or rarity hunters” from inadvertently destroying the remaining plants. “Too much information can be counterproductive,” he says.

He continues to conduct research and hopes to stay abreast of changes due to climate change. He says that if tropical species begin to proliferate at higher elevations, or alpine species begin to die off, these could all be early indicators of global climate change.

His interest in ferns is unabated and he has already found fern taxa that he missed during his research for the book. He is also intensively looking into groups that often form hybrids, which have the potential to generate an array of new fern species. He updates his efforts on his blog at https://picasaweb.google.com/116136418529949606360.

And while his new volume has generated considerable praise, he says personal success was never his motivation. He refers to the German word for science, Wissenshaft, to explain his ambition. The term means “to generate knowledge, to collect, gather, process and so on knowledge,” he says. “That’s what it’s all about.”

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Timothy Ferry is a writer based in Taipei.

Copyright © 2012 by Timothy Ferry