Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica |Plan of the Manual| 250 
often without comment. Summaries of overall geographic range in local floras are fre- 
quently not authoritative, and may perpetuate early misidentifications or taxonomic 
misconceptions. Although the Manual inevitably harbors these same kinds of errors 
(with regard to other countries) in its general distribution statements, we have insisted 
upon explicit documentation where Costa Rica is concerned. 
Usually just one voucher is cited, although two or more are occasionally cited for 
very rare species known from just a few collections. An effort has been made to cite 
modern collections duplicated in at least one Costa Rican herbarium (usually CR, INB, 
or USJ). Herbaria are designated by acronyms according to Index herbariorum (Holm- 
gren et al., 1990; see also http://www.nybg.org/bsci/ih/). Rarely, only a type illus- 
tration or a photograph of a lost type could be cited. All accepted species with a type 
attributed to Costa Rica are treated in full, even if the type is the only Costa Rican 
record and is an illustration, or a specimen that is no longer extant (or if the attribution 
is dubious). This policy (which comes into play mostly for orchids) has occasionally 
been stretched even further, to admit species on the basis of such records that do not in- 
volve types, but other authoritatively identified illustrations or lost specimens; see, e.g., 
Dresslerella stellaris (Orchidaceae). 
Citation of vouchers in the Manual is intended to authenticate the occurrence of 
taxa in Costa Rica, and also to fix the application of names by contributors. Supple- 
mental specimen data for accepted species can be sought elsewhere, for example, on 
the Internet at: 
http://www.inbio.ac.cr/bims/PLANTAE.html 
A more powerful search engine, giving access via collector name and collection 
number as well as numerous geographic, taxonomic, and specimen or species attri- 
butes, is available at: 
http://atta.inbio.ac.cr/ 
These sites, derived from INBio’s ATTA database, display more than 120,000 plant 
records (inherited, in part, from the original database of the Manual project). The ATTA 
search engine also features active links to INBio’s species pages (UBIs), for those spe- 
cies having such pages. 
The Missouri Botanical Garden’s much larger TROPICOS database (which partly 
overlaps with the INBio database) may be consulted at: 
http://mobot.mobot.org/W3T/Search/vast.html 
TROPICOS can be searched by genus and species, as well as collector name and 
number. 
Both the first- and last-mentioned sites feature map-making capability. 
