Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica 47 
Braulio Carrillo National Park, Quebrada Molinete (1990) 
Peninsula as his botanical home base, and continued until 2003 (when he began working 
for the La Selva Biological Station) to contribute exciting discoveries from the region. 
The Manual de plantas de Costa Rica is based on these new collections, as well as 
the historical collections accumulated mostly at the herbaria of the Museo Nacional de 
Costa Rica (CR), the Field Museum of Natural History (F), the Missouri Botanical 
Garden (MO), and the Smithsonian Institution (US). The four significant herbaria in 
Costa Rica harbor slightly over 400,000 specimens, but probably over half of these are 
duplicates held in common. Perhaps as many as a third of the ca. 220,000 specimens in 
the CR herbarium are duplicates from INBio’s ca. 120,000 collections. Thus, the total 
number of specimens (not counting duplicates) on which the Manual is based is prob- 
ably closer to 300,000. 
The Manual database, created by Barry Hammel in 1986, was used for label produc- 
tion and data management while the project was based at the Museo Nacional, and con- 
tinued to be used for the same purposes following our move to Santo Domingo in 1989. 
In 1996, the accumulated 60,000+ specimen data were transferred to INBio’s own “Bio- 
diversity Information Management System” (BIMS). The web representation of the Man- 
ual specimen database, designed by former INBio web-wizard Werner Bohl, was frozen 
as of August 1996, and is available, mostly for historical purposes, as of this writing at: 
http://www.mobot.org/manual.plantas/lista.html 
By 2000, the INBio database system was totally redesigned and renamed ATTA (after 
the genus Afta, leaf-cutter ants that grow fungi for food). Currently, the information held 
there has two principal WWW portals, one that is a direct descendant of the Manual: 
http://www.inbio.ac.cr/bims/PLANTAE.html 
