Vascular Plants of the Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica

Reinaldo Aguilar, Xavier Cornejo, Daniel S. Aguilar, Melissa Tulig, Catherine Bainbridge, and Scott A. Mori

The New York Botanical Garden (NY), Friends of the Osa, and Los Charcos Center for Regional Plant Diversity are working together to produce a database driven, specimen based, illustrated checklist of the flowering plants of the Osa Peninsula in Puntarenas province of Costa Rica. Click here to see a map of the Osa Peninsula.

The goals of this project are to:

1. Continue the inventory of the plants of the Osa, the plants of Costa Rica, and the plants of Central America by making herbarium specimens to document the presence and distribution of species on the peninsula.
2. Attach selected images of herbarium specimens and digital images taken in the field to the records of herbarium specimens serving as vouchers for them.
3. Contribute to the conservation of the plants of Costa Rica by identifing those species that need to be given special consideration for protection because they are endemic and/or the habitats in which they occur are threatened.
4. Provide tools that will allow researchers and the general public to recognize Osa plants, learn their names, understand their ecology, and participate in their conservation.

The specimen information on these pages can be downloaded as indicated in the detail pages that appear after a specimen search. The localities of endangered species, such as some orchids, are not revealed online.