Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica 43 
slope (see, e.g., Cascante & Estrada, 1999), most recently with funding from the Span- 
ish government. From his base at UCR, Jorge GOmez-Laurito generates a steady stream 
of publications, mainly floristic treatments and descriptions of new taxa, sometimes in 
collaboration with promising students such as Oscar Valverde. Under the leadership 
of director Dora Emilia Mora de Retana (1940-2001), and with guidance from John 
T. Atwood and fellow orchidologist Robert L. Dressler (b. 1927), the Jardin Botanico 
Lankester has blossomed into one of the most active research centers in the country 
(Warner, 2003). However, Costa Rican orchidology was recently dealt a severe blow by 
the nearly simultaneous deaths (see C. O. Morales, 2001; Warner, 2002) of Mora de Re- 
tana and her colleague Joaquin Garcia Castro (1944-2001), jointly responsible for 
the first modern checklist of Costa Rican orchids (Mora-Retana & Garcia, 1992). Their 
legacy is now being well served at the Jardin Botanico Lankester by Carlos O. Morales 
(b. 1964) and his associates, including Mario A. Blanco (b. 1972), Jorge Warner, and 
Italian orchidologist and illustrator Franco Pupulin. Morales and Pupulin edit the well- 
received new journal Lankesteriana, and Pupulin (2002) has produced an updated Costa 
Rican orchid checklist. Pablo Sanchez-Vindas is now at UNA with Luis Poveda, with 
whom he has recently published a pair of identification guides to Costa Rican trees 
(Poveda A. & Saénchez-Vindas, 1999; Sdnchez-Vindas & Poveda A., 1997). Since 1986, 
Luis Diego Gomez has been the director of OTS’s Jardin Botanico Wilson, where he has 
overseen a botanical exploration of the nearby forests by collector Isidro Chac6én, and 
continues to facilitate the work of visiting botanists such as Alexander Krings (Krings, 
1999). Cactus specialist Marta Rivas Rossi, based at the Universidad Estatal a Distan- 
cia in San José, has contributed valuable treatments of her group (Rivas R., 1997, 1998). 
Until recently, the OTS La Selva Biological Station employed resident plant expert Or- 
lando Vargas, who was continually on the lookout for new records. Botanists Gerardo 
Herrera, Rafael Ocampo, and Gerardo Rivera (b. 1948), though unaffiliated with 
major institutions, pursue their independent collecting agendas. 
More foreign botanists worked in Costa Rica during the 1990s than in any previ- 
ous decade. Recent foreign visitors have included Stephen W. Ingram (b. 1961) and 
Karen Ferrell-Ingram (b. 1958), formerly of The Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, 
whose focus on epiphytes resulted in a guide to these plants for the Monteverde reserve 
(Ingram et al., undated); American Peace Corps volunteer Patrick Harmon (b. 1958), 
who made a number of well-prepared and significant collections (deposited at INB) of 
rare tree species from Manuel Antonio National Park towards a guide to the trees of the 
park (Harmon, 2004); British plant taxonomist T. D. Pennington (b. 1938), in search 
of various families for his broad-spectrum monographic work; Danish ecologist 
Karsten Thomsen, German Stefan Merz (b. 1962), and Austrians Werner Huber 
(b. 1961) and Anton Weissenhofer (b. 1967), all of whom contributed important col- 
lections, mainly from the Golfo Dulce region; and Jens Bittner, who botanized exten- 
sively in the Alberto M. Brenes Biological Reserve and the Cordillera de Talamanca. 
