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Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica

Main | Family List (MO) | Family List (INBio) | Cutting Edge
Draft Treatments | Guidelines | Checklist | Citing | Editors

The Cutting Edge

Volume XVIII, Number 3, July 2011

News and Notes | Leaps and Bounds | Germane Literature | Season's Pick | Annotate your copy

FLACOURTIACEAE. Late last year, Manual co-PI Nelson Zamora (INB) was briefly in the Lancetilla region of Honduras working with a CATIE student, whose thesis project involves a characterization of vegetation types along an altitudinal gradient using 50 m2 plots. One of the spp. encountered during the sampling was Chiangiodendron mexicanum T. Wendt, a country record for Honduras, augmenting the range "S Méx. y Bel., CR" indicated in the Manual. It seems quite likely that this nondescript, understory sp. will eventually turn up in countries like Guatemala and Nicaragua, nullifying any perceived Costa Rican disjunction.

GERANIACEAE. We recently learned from INBio botanist Daniel Santamaría that a whole batch of specimens formerly identified as Geranium guatemalense R. Knuth (the name used in Francisco Morales's recently published Manual treatment of Geraniaceae) had been returned by family specialist Carlos Aedo (MA) redetermined as G. seemannii Peyr. var. seemannii. We initially assumed that this was a breaking development, but it turns out to be stale news that we have been slow to pick up on. Geranium guatemalense has been regarded as a synonym of G. seemannii in the yet-to-be-published Flora mesoamericana Geraniaceae account (posted on the Internet in Dec. 2010), and TROPICOS records numerous Costa Rican specimens determined under the latter name by Meso chief Gerrit Davidse (MO) dating back to 2000. So Geranium seemannii it shall be!

ERRATA. In our announcement of the initiation of the new journal Phytotaxa [see under "News and Notes" in The Cutting Edge 17(1), Jan. 2010], we indicated that at least some of the articles would be available on-line. We were not aware, however, that on-line access may come with certain perks. Palm specialist Andrew Henderson (NY) advises (in litt., 28 April) that his recent Geonoma revision (see Henderson, under "Germane Literature" in our last issue) is not only available in its entirety—and gratis—on-line, but that "all the images are in color and look a lot better than the black and white printed version." Check this out at the following URL:

http://www.mapress.com/phytotaxa/content/2011/pt00017.htm

Our review of Andrew's revision also stated that "there are no exsiccatae citations associated with the taxon entries" (this is where the "errata" kick in). In fact, the entire database, including all the specimen data on which the monograph was based, is available at:

http://sciweb.nybg.org/Science2/res/Henderson/Geonoma.xls.zip

Here may be found a list of all the specimens examined, which can be easily sorted by author, country, etc. This should prove to be an extremely useful resource (we must have overlooked the reference to it in the hard-copy revision).

And lastly, we jumped to a conclusion in identifying the palm pictured on the cover of the Phytotaxa revision as Geonoma epetiolata H. E. Moore: turns out is is G. stricta (Poit.) Kunth, a South American sp. that we barely know! It pays to always check one's sources.

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