Field of Science

Only a couple more days in Costa Rica

We are preparing to leave La Selva and head back to San Jose, before returning to the states. This morning the class talked about online resources associated with tropical plants. One of the resources that we discussed is The Digital Flora of La Selva (La Flora Digital de La Selva). This is an online database that contains digital photographs of the plants growing at the biological station. The photos vary from overall habit shots to zoomed in photos of flowers or sori. Unfortunately there are not any mosses in the database. The home page mentions that they are only focusing on vascular plants. Since mosses do not have vascular tissue (xylem and phloem), which are specialized tissues in plants to move water and sugars around, they were not included. I think that this is a bit prejudice, but oh well.

I am not sure if anyone has studied the bryophytes at La Selva. I hope that they have, but I did a quick search online and did not come up with anything. I am going to ask around this evening to see if anyone knows of any bryophyte research happening in the area.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Markup Key:
- <b>bold</b> = bold
- <i>italic</i> = italic
- <a href="http://www.fieldofscience.com/">FoS</a> = FoS