Guide to Tendrillate Climbers of Costa Rican Mountains

Climbers, such as lianas and vines, are important constituents of tropical forests and perhaps the single most important physiognomic characteristic differentiating tropical from temperate forests, occurring on nearly 50 percent of forest trees in Central and South America. Despite their widespread nutritional and medicinal use, lianas remain poorly understood ecologically. “Tendrillate Climbers” offers comprehensive coverage of all of the tendrillate lianas of Costa Rica and most of the tendrillate lianas of Central America. This unique reference provides: excellent keys to families and separate keys to genera and species; state-of-the-art nomenclature and lists of synonymy when other scientific names have been published or used informally; and each species illustrated by the author’s hand-drawn line art. An invaluable addition to our understanding of tropical forests, the book offers new information as well as information brought together from dispersed publications and unpublished lists and reports. In these times of habitat fragmentation and species loss, this data is a significant contribution to the biological research that is thriving in Central America, especially Costa Rica. “Tendrillate Climbers” fills a major gap in the botanical literature. Its high level of scholarship and comprehensive coverage will astonish the tropical botanists, forestry scientists, ecologists, biologists, and horticulturalists who will want it as a reference for their continued work on this neglected group of plants.