Flora Genérica des los Páramos: guía ilustrada de las plantas vasculares (Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden 92)

Extract

A guide to the plants of islands in the clouds

The Andean páramos are magical places. Islands of grassland on the cloud-covered tops of mountains from Costa Rica to Venezuela extending to northern Peru, they form an archipelago replete with endemic plants and animals. They are not, however, isolated. The Andes are home to many of the great South American cultures, who still live and benefit from the services provided by their local ecosystems, including the páramo. Due to their fragmented nature and their threatened status, the páramos have been the subject of much scientific study and exploration, in both the taxonomic and ecological fields. This lovely book represents a synthesis of the former for vascular plants – ferns and angiosperms. With contributions from thirteen botanists, mostly from the New York Botanical Garden, the volume provides a synoptic account of all the genera one would encounter along the archipelago of the Andean páramos. Each genus is illustrated with beautiful modern line drawings, many done by the 2005 Linnean Society of London Jill Smythies Award winner Bobbi Angell, some by plates from historic volumes (several from that classic of neotropical botany the1799 Flora Peruviana et Chilensis of Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón, whose explorations of Peru revealed many of the treasures of the páramo to European botanists for the first time), and some by clever scans of herbarium specimens. Each family or genus begins with key references to monographs or other modern taxonomic works; it is sobering that most families treated here do not have such references; there is still a lot of work to do in Neotropical botany! The book begins with excellent dichotomous keys to major groups, then keys to the families within these groups. Genera themselves are keyed out only for large groups, such as the Asteraceae, where a superb key to the 113 genera – complete with explanations of synantherological terms – will be useful to students of botany anywhere! So far this all sounds like a common garden flora, descriptions, illustrations, keys. This book, however, is a flora with a difference. The book – as one might suspect from the title – is in Spanish, an important feature that will make this work live far beyond its roots. Why, one might ask, should an English language journal like the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Societybe interested in reviewing a book in Spanish – perhaps slightly inaccessible to its own English-speaking readership? For the very important reason that guides and keys for botanical identification are critical to our ability to study plant diversity, and in addition to being beautiful, this guide will be accessible to many in the region. Local capacity to undertake botanical inventory, ecological study or biodiversity assessment depends upon having the tools with which to begin to identify organisms. This means that expensive books produced in English and held in the museums and herbaria of the developed world are great, but of no practical use in addressing the real threats that face habitats like the Andean páramos. This important book has the potential to support local study of páramos by students and their professors in the Andes; this in turn facilitates better valuation of the páramos for the ecosystem services they provide. How can we even begin to try to conserve or value something we know nothing about? The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (http://www.maweb.org), undertaken at the turn of millennium to assess the state of our fragile Earth, concluded that ‘A major obstacle for knowing (and therefore valuing), preserving, sustainable using and sharing benefits equitably from the biodiversity of a region is the human and institutional capacity to research a country's biota.’ It is works like this one that help with this capacity – with this as an inspiration and guide to study we can confidently predict that the next edition will be written entirely by botanists from the páramo regions, a fitting legacy.