Description: This volume continues the work of the groundbreaking Flora Mesoamericana, the first major regional flora ever written in Spanish.
The Flora Mesoamericana describes, for the first time, all the vascular plants growing in the five southernmost states of Mexico and all the Central American republics. Hundreds of botanists specializing in tropical taxonomy from around the world are collaborating on this extraordinarily important project. This volume includes fifty-nine families with 243 genera and 1375 species of dicotyledons, of which 676 are endemic to the Mesoamericana region. Of this total number of species, 358 (26%) have been discovered, and for the first time scientifically named and described, since the beginning of the Flora Mesoamericana project in 1980. The largest families are Lauraceae (262 species), Annonaceae (170), and Cactaceae (106). The most diverse genera in Mesoamerica are Ocotea (96 species), Phoradendron (61), and Magnolia (53).Brief description: Carmen Ulloa Ulloa joined the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1993 and is a senior curator with the Missouri Botanical Garden. She obtained her Licenciado degree from the Catholic University in Quito, Ecuador and her PhD from Aarhus University in Denmark. She currently serves as vice president of Ecuador Academy of Sciences and as co-chair of the IUCN Ecuador Plant Specialist Group. She is a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon. Her research focuses on plants from the Andes mountains. She joined the Flora Mesoamericana project in 2009 as editor and currently project coordinator.