Stephenson Awarded Grant From the National Geographic Society

Steve Stephenson, a research professor in the department of biological sciences at the University of Arkansas, has been awarded a grant of $10,000 from the National Geographic Society in support of a project titled “Mycetozoans associated with tropical forests of SE Asia” that will be carried out in Laos, Myanmar and Thailand during the next two years.

The purpose of the project is to obtain the basic inventory data needed to begin to understand and to elucidate the distributional and ecological relationships of two groups of mycetozoans (myxomycetes and dictyostelids) in a region of the world where they are an understudied group of organisms.

The project will have both a field component (surveys for specimens that have fruited in the field under natural conditions) and a laboratory component (culturing from samples of plant debris brought in from the field) for myxomycetes, whereas dictyostelids (which are virtually impossible to detect directly in the field) will be cultured from samples of organic material.

Much of the field component will be carried out by Thida Win Ko Ko, one of Stephenson’s former students and now a mycologist at Mae Fah Luang University in Chiang Rai, Thailand. The most recent grant is the seventh time Stephenson has been funded by the National Geographical Society, which has supported previous projects in Alaska, India, New Zealand, Russia and the subantarctic Auckland Islands.