Lastly, and after a few years of fieldwork, identification, writing, checking, modifying and correcting our guidelines to the vascular pants of La Amistad Binational Park, produced by a staff of Costa Rican and Panamanian botanists, and myself, has been printed! It has been a difficult and protracted enterprise which at a number of instances I believed would by no means be accomplished and particular thanks go to a really affected person and devoted editor, Maarten Christenhusz. Checklists are usually not extremely regarded in scientific circles as they’re successfully lists of what has been documented at explicit place. They’re although, extremely necessary as they symbolize verified and falsifiable lists synthesising information from a number of sources and are sometimes the constructing blocks of different scientific analysis and far more extremely cited publications. Additionally they present a baseline for conservation and future exploration.
La Amistad itself is a UNESCO World Heritage property and Binational Park shared by Costa Rica and Panama. It covers about 4,000 km2 and incorporates an unbelievable 3,046 species of vascular vegetation, of which 73 are discovered nowhere else. This makes La Amistad one of the species-rich locations on earth for vascular vegetation and of nice significance for conservation. A part of the explanation for this excessive variety is the variety of contrasting habitats from Paramo, pure grasslands to evergreen oak forest, cloud forest and tropical moist forest.
The plan to do a guidelines to the park adopted a number of years of area exploration undertaken as a part of Flora Mesoamericana after which a Darwin Initiative challenge to generate baseline data for the park’s administration. This concerned mountaineering and tenting for 2 to 3 weeks at a time and was a number of the most exhilirating fieldwork that I’ve achieved. As soon as we had our collections recognized we then used inventories of native herbaria in Costa Rica and Panama, present taxonomic remedies mixed with dependable on-line sources equivalent to Tropicos to compile a extra exhaustive listing. We then in contrast this to a vegetation map which we had produced and elevation ranges from specimen labels to affiliate every species with a specific vegetation sort and within the pursuits of verifiability we cite the entire identified colections of every species made within the park. I’m certain there are a number of errors ready to be uncovered within the listing however regardless of this, and its comparatively low affect issue, it’s in all probability the paper that I’m most happy with having been concerned with. Firstly as a result of for a number of years I feared it could by no means get completed, and secondly as a result of a lot of the authors are Costa Rican or Panamanian.
