https://www.westontesto.com/in-the-field daily 0.75 2021-07-16 https://www.westontesto.com/code daily 0.75 2021-12-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/760cda42-3861-4740-a960-32f385d7360c/plot.jpg Code & Data - Code & Data Availability Tobias Keene, D.D.S. Hailing from Richmond, Virginia, Dr. Tobias Keene brings a bit of unabashed Southern hospitality to all his patients. He moved to Washington, D.C. over thirty years ago as a freshman at Ivy College. Right after graduation, he attended World University’s School of Dentistry. Before opening Keene Dental in 1994, he worked for free clinics and some of the finest practices in the District. He is part of the 123 Dental Association and stays up-to-date on the latest dental discoveries. When not striving to keep his patients happy and healthy, he’s enjoys hiking with his family in Rock Creek Park. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1629809998432-KBJDJ1202OZQPNOPWWRD/Plot+IDW+output-1.png Code & Data - Speciation Rate Interpolation Using IDW interpolation and specimen records to map speciation rates in R https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1629810644431-MHHS4E11MHG41FD6VNL8/plot+Biscale+map-1.png Code & Data - Estimating Phylogenetic Diversity Making species-community matrices from occurrence data in R https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/83074ba3-364b-458d-8408-cf6eed1ded7f/Figure7.png Code & Data - Species Occurrence Maps Flexible, visually appealing dot maps in R https://www.westontesto.com/new-page-2 daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626430850839-24HVCTXPY2T7FH4V0FV4/IMG_8051-e1459558192852.jpeg Mexico 2016 - Mexico 2016 Another spring, another trip to Oaxaca, Mexico to collect ferns with Michael Sundue (University of Vermont), Alejandra Vasco (then at UNAM, now at BRIT), and Rafael Torres (UNAM). This year, we went focused on a series of old collecting localities along the border of the Villa Alta and Ixtlan districts in Oaxaca's Sierra Norte. Our principal goal was to collect near Capulalpam de Mendez, a large town about 1.5 hours northwest of Oaxaca City where several important 19th and 20th century collectors had worked. Of course, things don't always go according to plan, especially when in comes to field work, and more especially in Oaxaca. After a few more hours on the road, we made it to the small, remote town of San Miguel Yotao. The town is only 10 km northeast of Capulalpam, but it is difficult to reach (only one bus a week travels between here and Oaxaca City, which is rather shocking given the importance of bus transit in remote parts of Mexico generally) and little explored. This time we had good luck finding the comisariado, but ongoing disputes with a neighboring town meant we would not be able to collect there this year. Our travel slowed by an inordinate number of speedbumps, it was late in the afternoon when we arrived in Villa Talea de Castro, by far the the largest town we had encountered since Capulalpam. A few hours and some exceptional sopa de pollo later, we had what we needed: permission to collect ferns and a guide to accompany us. We settled in for the night, with the plan to head into the forest above the town in the morning. In the morning's light, we realized the source of Villa Talea's relative wealth: extensive coffee plantations hugged the town's limits and continued downslope out of sight. This area is somewhat warmer and drier than other regions of the Sierra Norte, making it excellent coffee-growing terrain. Unfortunately, productive coffee territory and top-notch ferning rarely go hand-in-hand. As we climbed the mountain above Villa Talea, we encountered relatively few ferns, and the forest got drier and more disturbed as we climbed. After six hours and a modest haul of ferns, we decided we should head back to the truck, process our plants, and then move east towards Oaxaca's highest peak, Cerro Zempoaltepetl. Our plans were soon interrupted when our truck got hopelessly wedged in a ditch on the logging road above the town - it would be another 18 hours before it was dug out — the joys of field work! Not the most productive collecting trip I've been on, but there were some highlights: I made only the third collection of Asplenium insolitum, we made lots of valuable collections of the Elaphoglossum sartorii complex, and I got to see my first lucha libre once we got back to Oaxaca City! https://www.westontesto.com/costa-rica-panama-2017 daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626432065027-51CXQCZK02PZLLX9RNES/chirripo.jpeg Costa Rica & Panama 2017 - Costa Rica & Panama 2017 I started off this trip with Dave Barrington's Tropical Plant Systematics field course in Costa Rica, which has become a staple of the University of Vermont's Plant Biology Department, running every two years for the course of the last four decades. I've been involved in the course for the past three trips, and it is a blast. The trip focuses on the country's Pacific slope, and covers plants from the paramos of Cerro de la Muerte to the perpetually wet lowland forests of the Osa Peninsula. The course is primarily focused on flowering plants, but the fern diversity is too rich to ignore! On this trip, I was finishing up my PhD work, and so used the opportunity to collect a lot of Phlegmariurus, the lycophyte genus that has been the focus of my dissertation. Though the genus is much more diverse in the northern Andes, there are a lot of interesting species here, and I have been able to spend enough time with them to notice some new things, including lots of potential hybridization, which has gone practically unreported in the genus to date. It seems that hybridization is much more common in the terrestrial species than in the epiphytic ones, probably because of the tendency of the former group to grow in mixed-species communities. Detecting hybrids in this group is challenging because it appears that interspecific hybrids undergo appropriate pairing during meiosis and produce normal-looking spores (their viability remains unknown). Further, it is hard to pick out hybrids in the genus because, well, the species tend to look pretty similar. On this trip, I collected three likely hybrids: Phlegmariurus talamancanus × Phlegmariurus attenuatus, Phlegmariurus hoffmannii × Phlegmariurus reflexus, and Phlegmariurus brevifolius × Phlegmariurus crassus. Sequence data backs up the hypothesized hybridization schemes I came up with in the field - more on that soon! Unfortunately, while we were in the Osa Peninsula, I got quite sick with a flare-up of malaria that I contracted several years back. While I recuperated in San Jose, the rest of the course continued to Guanacaste Province and undoubtedly saw lots more great plants. Afterwards, I continued down the Caribbean coast and crossed into Panama. Though it was well-collected a century ago, much of Panama remains understudied with respect to fern and lycophyte diversity, and there are a lot of narrowly distributed species in both the far eastern and western portions of the country. On this trip, my plan was to scale Volcán Barú, Panama's tallest peak and home to a near-endemic species of Phlegmariurus. I had tried to summit two years prior with my friend Christian López, but we were unable to enter the park due to volcanic activity. This attempt also would prove ill-fated; the day before I was to start my hike, foggy weather settled in, and the park was closed again. Instead, I re-traced the steps of famed early 20th century fern collectors Alice Cornman, Ellsworth Killip, and William Maxon, heading up a small trail along the Rio Caldera that skirts the northwest flank of Volcán Barú. I had visited the trail on my previous trip, but only made it a short distance. Better prepared this time, I was able to push much deeper into the forest and found some great fern and lycophytes. Maxon described several species based on material collected from 'Holcomb's trail' - the remnants of which I was hiking on - and I was able to find some of the taxa still there, including Eupodium pittieri and Phlegmariurus foliaceus, Based on E.P. Killip's writings in "Fern-hunting in Panama" (American Fern Journal 9(1), 1919) the trail continued tens of kilometers to the north, eventually crossing the Talamanca Mountains before petering out in the dense rainforest of the Atlantic lowlands. Maybe on the next trip. https://www.westontesto.com/new-page-1 daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626429874328-6WS397BLRPWD4WB9Y2FL/IMG_2134.JPG Central America 2016 - Central America 2016 Four months and eight countries, all by bus (except for flight over the Darien Gap)! I was fortunate enough to work in herbaria and make field collections with local colaborators all along the way - a really great trip. A few highlights: -Walking along Holcomb's Trail in Provincia de Chiriquí, Panama. This trail, which runs over the pacific versant of the Talamancan cordillera, was an important collecting locality for early 20th century botanists, including Ellsworth Killip, Alice Cornman, and William Maxon. -With some luck, I found Phlegmariurus brevifolius atop Cerro Chirripo, the tallest peak in Costa Rica. This species is widespread in the northern Andes, but is extremely rare in Costa Rica, where it reaches the northern limit of its distribution. -Finding Diplazium × verapax on Volcan Maderas in Nicaragua. This taxon had been treated as a valid species, but its irregular leaf lobing suggested to me that it was more likely a hybrid. This lead to additional study that lead to the publication of a fun paper in Brittonia. -I got the chance to reunite with a good friend and excellent botanist in El Salvador, and he gave me a wonderful tour of the country. I got to see three species of Phlegmariurus in the field that I otherwise had only known from herbarium specimens. - I slept at the summit of the highest peak in Central America, Guatemala's Volcán Tajumulco (4220 m) and got to collect some phenomenal plants there. This mountain, along with nearby Volcán Tacaná, are far-northern hotspots for plant species otherwise restricted to alpine habitats in southern Central America and the Andes. Haven't hiked this before? Do it, but bring warm gear! https://www.westontesto.com/new-page-3 daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626434777521-H875TEZ5EBTB266VMJ74/cow.jpeg Switzerland/Austria/Italy 2018 - Switzerland/Austria/Italy 2018 If you're interested in fern biology, you've probably discovered that western Europe has the world's highest density of fern fanatics. A quick scan of the British Pteridological Society Bulletin, Fern Gazette or Pteridologist, for example, makes this quite clear - they are full of field trip reports ("Ferns of Colsterdale, west of Masham, Yorkshire Dales"), observations on unusual forms of common species ("Comparing the frills"), and other fun titles ("Unusual urban site for Adiantum capillus-veneris"). Put simply, our European counterparts really love their ferns and set a global standard for knowledge about the diversity and distribution of ferns in their part of the world. This intimate knowledge of the plants is reflected in the taxonomy of certain genera of European ferns, especially the wood ferns and the spleenworts. Unlike their counterparts in most other parts of the world, who generally seem content to lump all infraspecific entities together, European pteridologists have levied a carefully constructed and finely cut taxonomy on some troublesome groups, often with forms nested within varieties that themselves nested within subspecies. I have always admired the attention to detail exhibit by our European colleagues, but without the plants in front of me, have not been able to evaluate their taxonomic schemes for myself. Without further information, I had settled on three possibilities: 1) our European friends were willing to slice off any morphological variant as a new taxon (a la Hieracium?), 2) we Americans lacked the attentiveness to pick up on cryptic diversity in our own ferns (with some obvious exceptions: cheilanthoids and Botrychium for two) or 3) there simply was an exceptional amount of cryptic diversity in some European fern genera, analogous to our own Myriopteris or Botrychium. Perhaps the most complicated group of European ferns is the Dryopteris affinis complex, which is comprised of perhaps two dozen taxa recognized at various ranks. The group extends from the Middle East westwards through Europe and into some Atlantic islands but the center of the described diversity is firmly in central and western Europe. The taxa comprising the group are exceptionally similar to each other and morphological characters that consistently define and separate taxa are hard to come by. The difficulty in distinguishing the members of the complex appears to be principally due to considerable variation in ploidy and reproductive mode: diploids, triploids, tetraploids, pentaploids, and hexaploids are known and apomixis is widespread. To complicate this further, the apomictic taxa (which typically skip sexual reproduction in favor of spontaneous generation of a sporophyte from a gametophyte of the same ploidy) frequently hybridize with closely related sexual species, presumably via functional sperm. There is even evidence that individual sporophytes can produce spores of different ploidy levels (Ekrt et al 2015)! With all this considered, it is no surprise that considerable discomfort remains among the European pteridological community on which taxa to recognize and at what rank. I've been interested in some peripheral members of the Dryopteris affinis group (Mexico's Dryopteris pseudofilix-mas and the pantropical Dryopteris wallichiana, to name two) for several years now, so I was thrilled when Michael Kessler (University of Zurich, Switzerland) reached out about including members of this group in the sampling for the ongoing GoFlag phylogenomics project that I am working on as a post-doc. Even better, Michael suggested that my postdoc advisor Emily Sessa and I visit Switzerland to join a large collecting expedition aimed at the Dryopteris affinis group (and some other taxa) this summer. Given my curiosity about this seemingly intractable species complex, Emily's love for the genus (her PhD focused on Dryopteris systematics and functional ecology, and she continues working on the group), and the fact that it meant doing fieldwork in the Alps, it was a no-brainer to take up his offer. How bad could these taxa be? Fortunately for us, Michael planned the itinerary, which was organized with input from two German experts (Jens Freigang and Günther Zenner) who are experts in the group. The trip would take us from Zurich, through western Austria, into northern Italy, and then return to Zurich through south-central Switzerland. We would cover around 1000 kilometers and spend five days in the field with a total of twelve people representing Chile, Germany, Switzerland, and the USA. The general sampling approach was simple: find as many members of the Dryopteris affinis group as possible and collect herbarium vouchers, material for flow cytometry, and additional material for generating DNA sequence data. Naturally, I wanted to be in the field with these taxa to see if I could tell them apart. After a brief meet-up in Zurich with Michael, Marcus Lehnert (the world's foremost expert in tree fern taxonomy) and Michael's student Daniela, we headed two hours east to Vorarlberg, Austria’s westernmost state. Here, we met with the rest of the crew on the side of a logging road in the mountain. Within minutes, we were onto the ferns – first the lady fern, Athyrium filix-femina and the male fern, Dryopteris filix-mas. Taking a close look at each of them, it was hard to believe that they are conspecific with the plants we call those names in North America; this is especially clear for the male fern, which is much more robust and common in Europe than its North American counterpart ever is. Certainly, there are plenty of overlooked (or ignored) cryptic fern taxa in even the best-studied regions – these strike me as two obvious examples. While I mulled over these differences, we were onto what we came for: the Dryopteris affinis complex. The first representatives of the we saw were Dryopteris borreri (apomictic triploid) and Dryopteris affinis subsp. punctata (sexual diploid) – several plants of each taxon on a rocky slope just meters from where we parked our cars. I found the latter taxon to be fairly distinctive: true to its name, it has prominent vein endings that form punctations in its thick, deep green lamina. Dryopteris borreri, on the other hand, seemed to be everywhere and was (as best I could tell) defined mostly by lacking the characters of the other species. Other, more familiar ferns were scattered on the rocks here, too: Polystichum lonchitis, Polypodium vulgare, and Asplenium adiantum-nigrum. We stuffed bags full of the Dryopteris for herbarium vouchers and molecular analyses, and then moved on. We started up the gravel road, following local Dryopteris experts Jens and Günther and taking some time to enjoy the abundant raspberries and the odd lady fern here and there. Jens pointed at a large Dryopteris on the side of the road ahead of us and IDed it as Dryopteris cambrensis subsp. insubrica (apomictic triploid) – from 20 yards away. We looked at it as he listed off its definitive characteristics and shrugged – maybe it’s different!? We continued along and found more members of the group: D. borreri var. robusta (apomictic triploid), D. pseudodisjuncta (apomictic triploid), and the hybrid between D. filix-mas and D. affinis subsp. punctata. It was fascinating and overwhelming; they all started to blend together in my mind. We took a break from these with more familiar taxa growing on a nearby talus slope: Dryopteris carthusiana (sexual tetraploid, convincingly like the American plants), Dryopteris dilatata (sexual tetraploid, essentially the European counterpart to the American Dryopteris campyloptera), and Dryopteris expansa (sexual diploid, not-so convincingly similar to the American plants under that name). Some fun non-ferns included Huperzia selago and Spinulum annotinum, which formed extensive colonies on the shaded slopes. From Vorarlberg, we headed back west, crossing through Liechtenstein (!) and re-entering Switzerland, heading south towards Italy through the San Bernandino pass. After about 90 minutes in the car, the German-language signs yielded to Italian ones (and some in Romansh, Switzerland’s fourth official language!). After another hour weaving through spectacular alpine landscapes, we crossed into the plains of Lombardy, Italy. We soon arrived at our destination: Maccagno con Pino e Veddasca, a beautiful town with an absurdly long name on the shores of Lago Maggiore, Italy’s second-largest lake (after Lake Garda, another glacial lake about 150 km to the east). We checked in to our hotel, had excellent pizza (of course), and then got to work pressing plants. With decades of experience collecting large numbers of plants for elevational transects around the world, Michael and his group made quick work of the pile of Dryopteris – I managed to stuff some pinnae in envelopes for DNA extraction back home. We started early the next day and made several stops in the field in both Switzerland and Italy (made easy by the Schengen Zone’s laissez-faire approach to border crossings). Top on our list was visiting a population of Dryopteris remota (apomictic triploid), a rather peculiar species thought to be derived from a cross between the diploid race of D. affinis subsp. affinis and D. carthusiana. Jens and Gunther led us to a large population on a forested hillside overlooking the Swiss-Italian border, though for once we all could have picked it out for ourselves – the large, broadly lanceolate and irregularly dissected leaves of this species were like nothing else we had seen on the trip. Instead, the plants reminded me of some D. carthusiana-derived hybrids that are familiar from North America, such as D. × uliginosa (sterile tetraploid) and D. × benedictii (sterile pentaploid). With D. remota in the bag, we started searching for D. × alpirsbachensis, the sterile pentaploid backcross between D. remota and D. carthusiana. After an hour of searching, we *possibly* found it, scattered amongst dozens of D. carthusiana. More detailed study is needed to confirm our field hypothesis – fingers crossed. There were plenty of other good ferns here, too: Asplenium scolopendrium, Polystichum aculeatum, and Asplenium adiantum-nigrum, to name a few. We stopped at a few other sites nearby and found some other gems, including Polystichum braunii (which is quite rare in that part of Europe) and Dryopteris affinis subsp. affinis, which was growing scattered amongst its close relative, Dryopteris affinis subsp. punctata. A cold ran materialized from the mountain pass above us and chased us back to Italy, where we could study the plants without our hand lenses fogging up. After two full days in the field with these plants, I was starting to see the differences between them, but I wasn’t sure that the North American community of botanists would accept such finely separated taxa as distinct if these plants were growing on the other side of the Atlantic. For our last day in the field, we drove 100 km back into Swiss territory, where we got off the highway near the town of Quinto and began a slow ascent up a series of continuously narrowing switchbacks to Lago Ritòm, a spectacular alpine lake (with attached hydroelectric dam) perched in a narrow mountaintop valley. Our quarry here was an odd member of the Dryopteris dilatata complex that Jakob (Swiss fern expert in our group) had found there several years before. The plant was strange because it resembled Dryopteris dilatata but Jakob had counted its chromosomes and found it to be diploid (D. dilatata is tetraploid). Only one diploid member of the D. dilatata group was known in the area (D. expansa) and everyone who had seen this plant before seemed to be sure it was not that species, which is subtly distinct in the shape of its leaves and the color of the scales covering its rhizome. The notion that there was some yet-unknown fern growing along a rather well-explored Swiss lake should have struck me as hard to believe, but after three days with the Dryopteris affinis group I believed anything was possible. While the rest of us were still walking along the edge of the lake, Jakob scrambled down from some wooded bank (this was a common occurrence by now) with a leaf of the mystery plant. The group passed it around and exchanged glances -some seemed to know by smell that this plant was “the plant,” others were content to recognized it as a Dryopteris – and we set off to see the plant in situ. Once we entered the woods, Jakob and the other local Dryopteris experts started to sort through the dozens of ferns around us: dilatata, dilatata, another dilatata, mystery plant, another dilatata. As with the Dryopteris affinis aggregate, the differences were small but real. The mystery diploid plant differed from the more abundant Dryopteris dilatata in leaf color and texture as well as something about the presentation of the leaves (flow cytometry would later confirm our field determinations). We spent about an hour looking at the plants and making a few collections, forming a rather comical human chain to pass collection bags and leaf samples up and down the slope. In the background, a well-caffeinated Jens scampered about, identifying every Dryopteris on the mountain. We took some photos and headed back down to the lake for some lunch. After lunch, we walked to the other side of the lake to look for Botrychium in some pastures but were unable to find them – we surmised that the ephemeral plants had either died-back for the season or they were all eaten by cows, which apparently is a thing that happens in Switzerland. Our consolation prizes were Gymnocarpium robertianum, Dryopteris borreri (which I am proud to say I picked out from a distance of twenty feet), and Asplenium septentrionale, a peculiar spleenwort that looks like a tuft of grass. On the way back to the parking lot, we spotted a large population of Selaginella selaginoides atop a rock wall; we made a few collections (every herbarium needs more lycophytes!) and then headed back to the cars. We were headed for the town of Härkingen some two hours to the north, but made another stop halfway to see Asplenium scolopendrium, Polystichum setiferum, and an undescribed member of the Dryopteris affinis complex. We arrived in Härkingen around 8pm, just as a cold rain began to fall. We had reservations at what must be one of the most unique lodgings in Switzerland – Alte Gärtnerei, a bed and breakfast built into a greenhouse. We found out about the place because two members of our group (Maria and Michael) own a fern nursery that is run out of some of the greenhouses on the property, and the place was perfect for our group. Ernst, who runs the B&B with his wife, Rita, ordered us pizzas from a local restaurant while we settled in. We were too tired to process the plants we had collected that day, so we kept them in bags and instead elected to enjoy a few beers and admire a robust plant of ×Cystocarpium roskamianum that Michael and Maria brought over from their greenhouse. ×Cystocarpium is a fascinating plant: as demonstrated by Carl Rothfels and colleagues in a very nice paper published in American Naturalist in 2015, it is an intergeneric hybrid between Cystopteris fragilis and Gymnocarpium dryopteris, two species which belong to lineages that diverged some 60 million years ago. Only one individual of ×Cystocarpium is known, and the plant we were looking at was propagated from that clone. Despite holding two very different parental genomes within it, the plant seemed quite robust and not hindered by its inability to produce viable spores. We spent the following morning visiting the greenhouses of Michael and Maria, where they cultivate more than 600 species of ferns from around the world. It was a spectacular setup, and I got to see a lot of species that were new for me. In addition to impressive holdings of native Swiss ferns, they seemed to have a strong interest in several groups of tropical ferns, including the perennially popular staghorn ferns (Platycerium) and the ant ferns (Lecanopteris). They were generous enough to let me sample from their collections for our ongoing flagellate plants phylogenomics project (GoFlag), and I was glad to be able to help them out some with the identification of a few species. Härkingen is about halfway between Zurich and Bern and only an hour northwest of Lucerne, so if you are in the area, definitely check out the Farnwerk garden and consider staying at Alte Gärtnerei! That afternoon, said goodbye to Michael and Maria and headed back to Zurich, where most of the rest of the group disembarked after we finished processing the last of our samples. I stayed for a few more days, working with members of the Kessler lab on some collaborative projects. Best of all, I got to flip through the Dryopteris affinis collections again. This time, they all (okay, most of them) looked different. We'll see what the data say. https://www.westontesto.com/costa-rica-2019 daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626441332045-FNIOFJMLJ5MNJDEPA3S9/IMG_2148.JPG Costa Rica 2019 - Costa Rica 2019 I spent the month of January in Costa Rica, where I was helping to teach the Organization for Tropical Studies' "Tropical Ferns and Lycophytes" course with Robbin Moran (New York Botanical Garden), Eddie Watkins (Colgate University), Alejandra Vasco (Botanical Research Institute of Texas), and Carl Taylor (Smithsonian). I had participated in the course previously, both as a student in 2013 and as the TA in 2015, and was thrilled to be back with the group again this year. The course is two weeks long, includes stays at two field stations and several day trips, and covers an exceptionally broad range of topics - absolutely one of my favorites. This year, we have 16 students from six different countries; I was especially impressed by the diversity of research interests in the cohort and the quality of the four undergraduate students (this is a graduate-level course) who took part in the course. The students learned around 35 families and 85 genera of ferns and lycophytes, carried out an in-depth study on the ecology and ecophysiology of some Lomariopsis species and their hybrid, *successfully* squashed chromosomes, and danced a lot of samba/salsa/bachata/samambaia. This is not just an intensive field course but also an intense one - we were up at 6 am each day and I found myself working with the students in the lab until 9 pm --or later-- most evenings. I had a great time, and (as always) learned a lot from both the faculty and students on the course (it's hard not to have a great time when you combine pteridophytes and Costa Rica!). A huge thank you to OTS and especially Guiselle Castro, who does a tremendous amount of work to organize this and other courses! After the course, Aleja and I got to spend a few days in the field in premontane cloud forest on the western slope of Volcan Barva, in the northeastern part of Costa Rica. We visit several tracts of privately owned forest that flank the massive Parque Nacional Braulio Carrillo in the vicinity of San Miguel de Sarapiqui. The forests here are well-preserved and provide a great opportunity to see a rich cross-section of Mesoamerican fern diversity - Stigmatopteris, Elaphoglossum, Diplazium, Danaea, and Polybotrya are on all sides of the trails here. If you are in the area, I highly recommend both the Hotel Los Gallitos in San Miguel and the Albergue del Socorro in Virgen del Socorro. Both are family-run and offer nice cabins on their farms, adjacent to beautiful forest! After a few days in the mountains, Aleja and I returned to San Jose, where we met up with Robbin and Esteban Jimenez, a Costa Rican botanist who is both a fantastic field botanist and one of the nicest guys I have ever met. Esteban drove us over the other flank of Volcan Barva, where we stopped at Quebrada Gonzalez, a sector of Parque Nacional Braulio Carrillo that is one of Robbin's favorite spots. We spent the day in the field there, and got to see a tremendous amount of fern and angioperm diversity (along with a few Bothrops asper). Aleja left the following morning, but Robbin, Esteban and myself went to the Jardín Botánico Lankester in nearby Cartago. The garden is principally devoted to the study of orchids, and the research team there has been spectacularly productive for decades. We met with the garden's new director, Adam Karremans, who showed us around the greenhouses, some of the gardens and their new research building (incredible!), where we got to see the various labs and imaging centers where so much important orchidology happens. We were then lucky enough to run into the garden's former director, Mario Blanco, who showed us around the rest of the gardens. Mario recently took a new position at the University of Costa Rica and is the director of the USJ herbarium - I'm looking forward to visiting him there on the next trip! https://www.westontesto.com/home daily 1.0 2024-09-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/57b44903-dd4f-4079-9115-f68fcec29f3b/IMG_7746.JPG Home - Make it stand out With Elaphoglossum bakeri in Nariño, Colombia https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626948255754-LJTHTPGOY8ZELFC0Y8VE/treepanel1.png Home - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626948317714-G66WBTLQI5B3IF1XP7VF/treepanel2.png Home - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626782362195-L02UYX0ZIV54T8AKYYFD/cv_tab.png Home - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626948706988-2FFOYCYOAXB7JCFPKEG7/Fig_1_Richness_Figure.png Home - Publications Fan of ferns? Love lycophytes? You can access lab publications here: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626687261361-RBB8EO1W67077Z48NZJZ/IMG_8735.JPG Home - Research We use large data sets, computational approaches, and natural history collections to better understand vascular plant diversity, especially in the American tropics. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626688707687-34HVOT3FADVK6D80JAGF/IMG_8601.JPG Home - Fieldwork Fieldwork is an irreplaceable part of biodiversity research — it helps us to better know the organisms that we work with, develop important collaboration networks, and generate the data we need to advance our knowledge of the world around us. Members of our team conduct fieldwork in beautiful places with spectacular plants — you can find out more here: https://www.westontesto.com/new-page-4 daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626440693682-0GBH1GW0E4DV6PXV49H0/tectaria.jpeg Guatemala & Mexico 2017 - Guatemala & Mexico 2017 What a fun trip! Part vacation, part fieldwork - we got to visit a lot of really cool sites in central and western Guatemala, as well as Chiapas and Oaxaca, Mexico. My principal goals here were to track down some Polystichum and an undescribed species of Phlegmariurus, but ended up with all sorts of good plants. We flew into Guatemala City, and immediately headed north to the city of Coban. A small city with a pleasant atmosphere, Coban feels a world apart from the chaos of Guate. I found some interesting ferns in a small park at the limits of the city, but we only spent a day there before heading east to the karst landscape around Lanquín, which is world-known for Semuc Champey, a spectacular series of aquamarine pools over exposed limestone. Turns out, the botany in the area is really great too: Lanquín is situated in a dry valley, but the area near the Lanquín River is quite tolerable and harbors a lot of calciphile ferns - Asplenium trichomanes-dentatum, Anemia speciosa, and Tectaria heracleifolia were just a few. The pools are gorgeous, too. Later, we spent a few days near Lake Atitlán, which is situated in the heart of the Mayan highlands. The lake is beautiful (if contaminated) but the area's natural beauty has led to some of the towns surrounding the lake to lose some authenticity to large crowds of Americans and Europeans on yoga and reiki retreats. Even so, many of the smaller towns have kept their charm, and the botany in the surrounding volcanos is very good. On previous trips, I summited Volcán Atitlán and Volcán San Pedro; this trip, we opted to go up San Pedro another time. The lower parts of the trail pass through plots of coffee, but further up, the forest is protected and quite diverse. Chiranthodendron pentadactylon is common here - the large red claw-like flowers cover the trail in some places. There are good ferns too: Polystichum fournieri, P. rachichlaena, P. distans, Pleopeltis platylepis, and Ctenitis equestris, to name a few. We took a chicken bus to the border and eventually made it through customs in Tapachula, Chiapas. After a short time in the area (great ruins nearby) we started to make our way towards Oaxaca. Christina was principally interested in the city's art scene (it's phenomenal); I was more looking forward to the cuisine (also phenomenal) and botany (very phenomenal). We stayed for several days, and I got the chance to collect a lot of nice cheilanthoid ferns in the hillsides surrounding the city. As usual, Oaxaca was a great time. https://www.westontesto.com/helpful-stuff daily 0.75 2022-07-30 https://www.westontesto.com/new-page-90 daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626441574073-J15FMDQD70AJ14CFQ6JN/IMG_1670.JPG Dominican Republic 2019 - Dominican Republic 2019 In April of this year, I traveled to the Dominican Republic with FLAS curator and melastome/cactus expert Lucas Majure. He had been planning a trip for several months with the goal of collecting several poorly understood (and new) flowering plant species from the western part of the country, and invited me along - obviously an offer I could not turn down. Lucas does a lot of work in tropical dry forest, which I often avoid (not too many ferns there!) but we worked out an ambitious and exciting itinerary that would lead us to a diversity of localities, both in dry forests and in some of the wettest parts of the country. Precipitation regimes aside, we were excited about these localities because each was home to really strange plants that had only been collected a few times, by some of the great plant collectors of Hispaniola: Erik Ekman, Emery Leonard, Alain Liogier, Tom Zanoni, Walt Judd, and Teodoro Clase. We knew at the onset of the trip that several of our target species were undescribed, and figured we were bound to find other notable taxa, if we could find the collecting localities. With some luck, our start-of-trip organization went better than last time (we got a 4x4 truck at the first agency we went to!) and we had hashed out a rough plan of our trip with our colleagues Yuley Encarnación Piñeyro (curator of the JBSD herbarium) and Teodoro Clase (research associate at JBSD and plant collector extraordinaire) by the end of our first day. We would split our trip into two legs, with a break in Santo Domingo in the middle to process specimens and annotate specimens in the herbarium. We would cover over 1000km in each part of the trip, reaching the island's northern and southern shores, and skirting along the isolated Haitian border for hours. For anyone who has done field work in the Dominican Republic before, you know this means lots of motorcycles, fried chicken, guineo hervido, and a spectacular amount of speedbumps (usually with a banca or two adjacent). And lots of Presidentes. On the first leg of the trip, we skirted the southern coast just west of Santo Domingo, heading for a low, isolated mountain range overlooking the Caribbean. This mountain range, the Sierra Martín García, belongs to the national park system and harbors a number of endemic species. As we passed through the disturbed tropical dry forest to the west of Baní, we started to worry about how the trip would go - the vegetation was all brown and withered. Most of the country had been in the midst of a severe drought for months, and this part of the country was hit the worst. We wondered if our principal target species for the site (an undescribed Castela, Simaroubaceae) would even be visible. When we arrived at the base of the sierra, things seemed much the same as they did near Baní, but we hoped they might get better are we climb in elevation (a small fragment of cloud forest persists at the peak, around 900 m elevation). We dropped the car in four-wheel drive and slowly crept up the dry streambed that was the only road to the summit, and kept an eye out for the Castela. After about an hour, and 2/3rds of the way to the summit, Yuley spotted the plant - a thorny, nearly leafless shrub that stood out only on account of its bright red, raisin-sized fruits. We stopped, and Lucas confirmed that this was indeed the mystery Castela, to that point only known from a single collection by Teodoro Clase from the same site a few years prior. Lucas made some collections, including material with fruits and pistillate flowers (most Castela are dioecious); now we needed to track down the male plant. We continued towards the summit, and I found some fun ferns (Polystichum trapezoides, Thelypteris serra, and a Goniopteris only known from the type collection gathered by Erik Ekman a century ago) but did not see any more Castela. The sun was starting to set, so we drove hurriedly down the steep path towards base of the mountain when we heard Yuley again = ahí está la Castela! This time she spotted a plant bearing staminate flowers. Lucas, convinced that the plant was indeed a new species, snapped a few photos, pressed the second specimen, and we were on our way. We made it to Barahona late that night and finished pressing sometime in the early morning, leaving us a few hours to sleep before 6 am breakfast. The following morning, we continued our tour of the country's southwest with a trip to a site known as Las Filipinas, where John Mickel and Tom Zanoni had collected a number of odd ferns in the 1980s.. I have no idea where the name Las Filipinas came from, but the site refers to a region with dense mid-elevation cloud forest on the eastern flank of the Sierra de Bahoruco, just south of the town of Barahona. The site is accessible only along a steep dirt road that leads to a mine for larimar, a spectacular blue gemstone known only from this part of the Dominican Republic. The mine itself is quite the site - Haitiian men work in deep shafts to extract the rock by hand while their families subsist on small farms carved into the surrounding forest. Finding the collection locality itself would have been impossible if not for the experience of Teodoro, who had gone there numerous times in the past; he simply pointed at a shack along the road and told us to park alongside it. The family living there agreed to watch our truck while we scrambled down the forested ravine (fortunately their Spanish was much better than our collective handle on Haitian Creole), and we were on our way. Immediately, I found hundreds of the plant I was looking for - an odd fern called Goniopteris scolopendrioides, which stands out by having knife-shaped, irregularly lobed leaves. Based on specimens I had seen at JBSD, I expected to find it at Las Filipinas, but I never would have expected to see it in such abundance! It was the dominant small herb in the forest. We continued down the ravine for perhaps an hour, filling our collection bags with other ferns, melastomes, gesneriads, and even a strange Phyllanthus. After a short while, however, we realized we could go no further, and so we headed back to our car. We eventually found our way back to Barahona, and continued our trip. Before the first leg of our trip was done, we would find a different Castela in the far south of the country, rediscover a strange (probably undescribed) Polystichum on a remote hilltop in the far north, and find a number of odd cacti in the dry valleys that run into Haiti between the Sierra de Neyba and the Cordillera Central. After a two-day stop in Santo Domingo, we headed out again, this time principally to a series of mid- and high-elevation sites in the Cordillera Central. We started at a site called Rancho Arriba, which is adjacent a town of the same name in a small valley between Santo Domingo and the small city of Constanza. This site is a famous collecting locality, and was of particular interest to our group because it was the type locality for several Miconia species that had not been recollected since their initial discovery. Armed with locality data from Ekman's herbarium sheets, we took off in search of these plants, meandering along a series of anastomosing dirt roads in the mountains. After hours of circling the same hillsides on parallel dirt roads, we found two of our queries in short succession - each seemingly restricted to a single patch of forest that could be measured in meters squared. Botanically and literally, we were standing in the footsteps of Erik Ekman. Buoyed by our good fortune, we continued down an increasingly narrow and muddied road towards the Río Mahoma, another nearby locality that Teodoro assured us held lots of interesting species. As we inched over makeshift log-and-mud bridges towards the river, however, we had our doubts. Where there certainly had been pristine forest at the time of Teodoro's last visit, the area now was stripped of vegetation, save for the corn that a lone Haitian man in the distance was sowing. The road got narrower and narrower, and we soon became worried we would become stuck with no way to get back to civilization before sunset, which was only a few hours off. Teodoro ignored our protests, hopped out the truck, and walked ahead. We had no choice but to follow. After a few hundred yards, the road ended at the side of the river. We decided to cross the river on foot, heartened by what looked to be (finally!) intact forest on the other side. I somehow managed not to slip on the algae-covered boulders in the stream, and soon made it to the far side, where Amauropelta sancta, a small Fuirena, and a rheophytic Ludwigia competed for space in the gravel banks. I followed a small stream into the forest, and quickly found myself surrounded by ferns. I counted four Alsophila species, Elaphoglossum apodum and its giant cousin Elaphoglossum crinitum, and a new species for me, Diplazium hastile. As I stuffed my collecting bag, I came across a small fern growing in the stream and along its banks. I immediately recognized it as a member of the marsh fern family, Thelypteridaceae, but it was not a species I had seen before. The plant was perhaps 10" tall, with a tiny erect "trunk" and small, once-pinnate leaves. I immediately assumed it must be a member of the genus Goniopteris, which is very diverse in the Antilles, but this plant seemed to lack the small stellate hairs characteristic of that genus. Whatever it was, I decided it was strange, and made some collections. (Later, after studying collections at JBSD and consulting with thelypteridologists Alan Smith and Susan Fawcett, I decided it was in fact a dwarfed species of Amauropelta; either the poorly collected Amauropelta reducta or a new species...more soon!). I managed to stuff another few interesting species in my bag before the skies turned dark and threatened to strand us with a flash flood. After several wrong turns in the mountain roads above Rancho Arriba, we made it to the town of Bonao around 9 pm, and finished pressing plants a bit before two in the morning. The last goal of the trip was to visit the high elevation grasslands of Valle Nuevo, 20 km (as the crow flies) south of Constanza. This site was at the top of my list during the last trip to the country, but we didn't arrive until the sun was setting and had little opportunity to collect. Valle Nuevo is one of the classic collecting localities in Hispaniola, due in large part to the unusual habitats present there and the associated assemblage of taxa. Although the area is only ~2200 m above sea level, there are extensive bunchgrass (Danthonia domingensis) llanos, reminiscent of paramos of the northern Andes. The occurrence of these alpine grasslands at this low elevation is due to a general effect of insularity that depresses elevational habitat zonation relative to nearby continental areas, and presumably contributes to the high biodiversity of tropical islands, despite their (generally) small size and (generally) low elevations (anyone have a good reference for that?). I was particularly interested in it because Erik Ekman collected three strange lycophytes there in 1929 - an Isoetes, a Phlegmariurus, and a Lycopodiella. The Isoetes and the Lycopodiella are known from nowhere else on earth (the Lycopodiella only from Ekman's collection) and the Phlegmariurus is only known from a handful of other collections from nearby sites. Thanks to Ekman's impeccable notes, we were able to find the site pretty easily, and it was loaded with great plants! Among others, I collected a new species of Pityrogramma (pictured in the banner image for this page), the giant firmoss Phlegmariurus sintenisii (otherwise only known from the type locality in Puerto Rico, where it is apparently extirpated), a Sceptridium, and an irridescent Elaphoglossum. I even collected the world's smallest (?) Miconia, M. sphagnicola, another narrow endemic from Valle Nuevo. Unlike most members of that genus, which grow as large shrubs to medium-sized trees, this species barely reaches knee height. Unfortunately, the three lycophytes I was searching or were nowhere to be found, and with clouds closing in, we needed to start the long journey downhill towards Constanza (though a short distance in a direct line, the route takes several hours due to the poor condition of the road and the endless switchbacks). The following day, we made it back to Santo Domingo, and started the long process of writing labels and processing the rest of our specimens. It seems like another trip to the Dominican Republic is in order - I'll have to bring camping gear this time and stay at Valle Nuevo for a week to get all those clubmosses! https://www.westontesto.com/publications daily 0.75 2025-02-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626957409021-7YHD2X5ODVGE0XDXPOUR/google_scholar_tab.png Publications - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626957094573-M5ZNCXVNIYGS374J4HPL/cv_tab.png Publications - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.westontesto.com/research daily 0.75 2024-09-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626425744240-X93JX1R38R92FP3R15WD/IMG_9097.JPG Research - Land plant phylogenomics The Genealogy of Flagellate Plants (GoFlag) project has generated a comprehensive phylogeny of the flagellate plants: mosses, hornworts, liverworts, lycophytes, ferns and gymnosperms. To date, we have generated sequence data from about 450 nuclear loci for ~8000 of the ~30,000 taxa in these clades using a targeted sequencing approach. Beyond resolving relationships among major land plant lineages, we are very interested in understanding the evolution of key innovations in the land plant Tree of Life and are linking our phylogenomic dataset with data on functional traits, species distributions, and the fossil record. This project also has a significant educational component, and we are collaborating with pedagogy experts to develop online educational tools to promote learning about flagellate plants, from elementary school to universities. Some of these modules are already in use, and others are currently in development! You can access our pilot paper here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/400288dd-3e28-4b68-978f-c7422cd5b567/IMG_8062.JPG Research - Neotropical fern & lycophyte diversity The American tropics are one of the most biologically diverse places on earth, and this holds true for pteridophytes as well: more than 1/3 of the world's fern and lycophyte species are found in the Neotropics. A large and growing number of studies have examined why this region harbors so many species of organisms (and ferns, in particular); however, that species diversity itself remains understudied. This is evident when working in herbaria with large collections of Neotropical ferns and lycophytes - more often than not, species folders are filled with specimens that can be sorted out into 2, 3, or more groups. The reality is that taxonomists have not captured the diversity in these groups - there simply are too many taxa waiting to be described and not enough data to confidently separate them. Unlike the situation in temperate regions, where ploidy levels, reproductive mode, and often DNA sequences of most fern and lycophyte species have been systematically evaluated by botanists over the past century, little to nothing is known about most of their Neotropical counterparts beyond their morphology. Given the prevalence of reticulate evolution in ferns -resolving hybrid complexes nearly doubled the number of fern taxa recognized in the Flora of North America- filling in these gaps for the ferns of tropical America should go a long way toward improving species circumscriptions and will push the number of species recognized in the region even higher in the years to come! Currently, a major focus of research on this topic is centered on Colombia, which is the most fern-rich country in the Americas. Alejandra Vasco, Michael Sundue, and Wes received a $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to support our study of fern diversity in Colombia. This project, which is titled "PurSUiT: Collaborative Research: Accelerating Lineage Discovery to Document Neotropical Fern Diversity" will run from 2021-2025 and includes extensive field work, development of genomic resources, collections-based research, and student training. As always, close collaboration with local colleagues is a central part of this project, and we are excited to be back in Colombia! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626360798021-624H1UOB319A54TCR1W1/IMG_1650.jpg Research - Predicting extinction risks of an imperiled island flora Hispaniola is the second largest island in the Caribbean and harbors a rich flora with a large number of rare and endemic species that are acutely threatened by habitat loss and other factors. Recent studies have shown that the Haitian side of the island is nearly completely deforested, and the habitat loss on the Dominican side is accelerating - simply put, the island is in the midst of a mass extinction event that could result in the loss of hundreds or even thousands of plant species. This project, which we are carrying out in collaboration with partners at the Jardín Botánico de Santo Domingo, University of Florida, and Haiti National Trust, combines natural history collections, biodiversity informatics, the Greater Antilles, and endemic species. is rewarding because it has the potential to aid conservation of this imperiled flora. https://www.westontesto.com/colombia-2017 daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626432392190-EQFCWGF6P1FNR9C1PWA8/IMG_9108.JPG Colombia 2017 - Colombia 2017 Colombia is a special country, for a lot of reasons: wonderful people, vast wilderness areas, and astounding biological diversity, to name a few. The exceptional species richness mirrors the topographical complexity of the country, a fact to which anyone who has traversed the Colombian Andes in car or bus can attest. Like seeming every other group, the ferns and lycophytes of Colombia are diverse and remain understudied- time to get started! This was my third trip to the country, and my first to the Cordillera Oriental, the massive range the borders Amazonia on its eastern flank. I had received an invitation to speak in a symposium at the IX Congreso Colombiano de Botánica, which was held in the town of Tunja, which is about halfway between Bogotá and Bucaramanga. The meeting was a great opportunity to meet with Colombian colleagues, and Tunja was a pleasant (if chilly) town with a rich history. In addition, I got the opportunity to be involved teaching a short course for Colombian students on fern taxonomy and identification with Alexandre Salino, David Sanin, and Michael Sundue. After the meeting, I had the opportunity to go on a series of collecting trips. We started with a series of day trips to paramos and montane forests near Tunja, and then headed north to Parque Nacional El Cocuy, about 11 hours to the north by bus. Through a chance encounter in Tunja, myself, David Sanin, Gabriel Peñaloza-Bojacá, and William Bravo Pedraza received an invitation from a park ranger from El Cocuy to visit the park and do field work there. I had known about Cocuy for several years - it is well-known for its glaciated 5000m+ peaks- but only a few botanists had conducted fieldwork there. Until very recently, regions of the park had been occupied by guerrilla groups and was considered simply too dangerous to visit. Even now, only a small fraction of the park remains open to visitors, due to ongoing conflicts between park officials, local farmers, and the Uwa people, who still live on park lands. When we arrived in the principal park jumping-off village of Güicán, the effects of the park's closure on the local economy was evident, and there seemed to be little hope of change in the near future. As we learned in more detail later in our trip, these conflicts are uniformly complicated, tense, and never quick to resolve themselves (for a quick read on the issues, see this). After negotiating with the park manager for permission to visit the park, we were notified that we could spend three nights in the park, collecting along a series of trails that meander below the glacier-capped peaks. We would sleep in the guard cabins, and would have to bring all of our food and supplies with us - the entrance to the park was an hour from Güicán, and we were headed another hour inside the park. Thanks to the help of a woman in the curiously-still-open tourism office, we were able to get the phone number of a local farmer who would load us and our gear in the back of his pickup and take us to the cabins. After a long but pleasant ride, we arrived, paid the man, and threw our gear into the cabin. We were well above treeline and surrounded by paramo filled with Colombia's emblematic frailejones (Espeletia spp.). In the distance we could see the snowy summit of Ritacuba Blanco (5330 m) and a few other white peaks. Over the next three days, we would cover some 60 km of trails, collect perhaps 200 ferns and lycophytes, and get lost a few times. We spent the entire time above 4000 m, and reached 4800 m on our longest ascent - a 10 hour, 24km trip to the Laguna Grande de la Sierra, mostly in freezing rain and fog. We made a number of very special collections, including a likely undescribed Serpocaulon, endemic Phlegmariurus, and a mystery Sceptridium. Unable to dry our collections in the mountains, we packed them all with us back to the herbarium of the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica in Tunja. After a few days working in the national herbarium in Bogotá, David, Gabriel, Sandra Urbano and myself took an overnight bus to Pasto, the capital of the southern department of Nariño. We arrived after a nearly 22 hour bus ride, and found a decent hotel near the town center. Nariño is unlike much of the rest of Colombia that I have seen, and this pleasant small city has a spectacular backdrop: the Galeras volcano. After a short collecting trip to cloud forests above the nearby Laguna de la Cocha, we headed west towards the town of Ricaurte, on the road to the Pacific port town of Tumaco. Our goal was to visit the Reserva La Planada, a large tract of mid-elevation forest in the southern fringe of the Chocó. Both David and myself had seen numerous collections of odd and likely undescribed ferns from La Planada, and we all were intrigued by the reserve's story - after years as a hotbed of FARC activity, it finally was back in the hands of the Awá people, who had lived in the region for centuries. According to the few people we knew who had ventured to La Planada, it was a special place. The trip to the reserve is difficult, and required a lot of negotiation and re-negotiation with taxi drivers. The road from Ricaurte to the reserve is steep and made mostly of mud, so only 4x4s can make the trip (and ensures that their services draw a high premium). Instead of pay the high cost of a ride, most Awá either ride mules or walk to Ricaurte from their village, a 3 day trek into the forest. Eventually we arrived, and were surprised to see a rather large and well-developed biological research station at the end of the road. We met with the director, a non-Awá Colombian named Marcos, and a young Awá man named David who was the leader of the community. They were exceptionally gracious hosts, and within 15 minutes, several women appeared in the station's kitchen and were preparing us meals. By the end of our meal, another group of Awá had prepared rooms for us and a young man was introduced to us as our guide for the next three days. The diversity and sheer numbers of ferns at La Planada is astounding. As we followed our guide on seemingly non-existent trails through the forest, we found one pteridological oddity after another: a new Serpocaulon, an epiphytic Dennstaedtia, a 1.5m tall Elaphoglossum, a Parablechnum with 4 meter-long leaves arching over the road. The botany was only outdone by the rain; it rained 7 inches in the 3 days we stayed at the reserve, It was so wet that I did not press my collections until I was back in Pasto. With only a few days left until I was due to fly home, I left the rest of the group in Pasto (they were headed for Florencia) and took another long bus ride toward Medellín, where I spent the remainder of my trip working in the herbarium at the Universidad de Antioquia and eating empanadas. https://www.westontesto.com/dominican-republic-2018 daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626435811919-8HOJD0VZOWZYNCH2PBRR/IMG_1708.JPG Dominican Republic 2018 - Dominican Republic 2018 Hispaniola has been on my "to-do" list for fern collecting for several years now, and I finally got the opportunity to go (with a lot of support from the Jardín Botánico Dr. Rafael María Moscoso in Santo Domingo)! I've become increasingly interested in the Caribbean in the last few years, as I have become more aware of the spectacular endemism in the region and the fact that a large number of type collections of widespread taxa were made in the West Indies. This later point has become particularly important as I've started to work in some widespread Neotropical species complexes - obviously, including material from at or near type localities is critical for such work. I was finally able to make some progress towards working in the area in the spring of 2018, when I met several of the directors of national botanical garden of the Dominican Republic at a meeting in Havana, Cuba. Over the course of several months following that meeting, we developed a plan for a future visit to work in the herbarium, offer a short course in fern biology for students, and do fieldwork in the mountains of the country's western region. Thanks to a tremendous amount of help from Yuley Encarnación Piñeyro, the manager of the national herbarium, I was able to navigate the permitting process with relative ease, and things were set for a trip in the first half of December. On this trip, I was joined by Lindsey Riibe (University of Florida), Susan Fawcett (University of Vermont), Sally Chambers (Marie Selby Botanical Gardens) and Pedro Schwartsburd (Universidade Federal do Viçosa), all of whom work on various groups of ferns. Our plan was simple: start with a few days in the national herbarium to familiarize ourselves with the flora and localities, rent two trucks and head towards the border with Haiti to collect in the Sierra de Neyba and Sierra de Baoruco for a week, and then offer a short course on fern systematics to university students in Santo Domingo. As none of us had prior experience in the Dominican Republic, our success was dependent largely upon our friends in the herbarium, especially Yuley and the two resident field botanists, Teodoro Clase and Yommi Piña, who would accompany us on the trip. Despite some minor hiccups at the start of the trip (apparently reserving a 4x4 at a car rental agency in Santo Domingo does not ensure that you will get one) we were on the road soon enough, headed towards the limestone mountains of the country's southwest. Thanks to Teodoro's field experience, infallible memory, and penchant for 18 hour work days, what followed was one of the most efficient field trips I have participated in. Each of us had a list of "wanted" species, and after several long discussions in the herbarium and on the road, Teodoro and I hashed out an itinerary that would maximize our chances of finding those species. As I would find out along the trip, Teodoro not only knew the species and the localities we were looking for, he knew exactly where to find each species at each site (this knowledge appears to hold for the entirety of the Dominican Republic)! Our route was simple: we headed along Route 44 through Barahona Province, following the curving coast past Barahona and Enriquillo towards Pedernales Province and Parque Nacional Jaragua, which encompasses a spectacular dry scrubland laid over dogtooth limestone. From there, we pushed north along the abandoned roads of the ALCOA bauxite mining operation to reach the famed collection locality "Las Abejas", then followed the same route back to the town of Pedernales before heading north along the International Highway (which is closer to a cart path than a highway) to several localities along the Haitian border. We passed through Parque Nacional Sierra de Baoruco, crossed the depression at Lago Enriquillo, and then headed back into the mountains of the Sierra de Neyba, slowly heading eastward towards Santo Domingo. Throughout the trip, the botany was fantastic, though the ferns were quite patchily distributed - most were restricted to patches of wet montane forest surrounded by agricultural land and dry lowland forest. This made for a hit-and-run collecting trip - load your collecting bag at one site and drive 5 hours (which covered about 30 km, between the quality of Dominican mountain roads and our chronically faltering Mitsubishi pickup) until you find another humid bend in the road. I found most of the lycophytes I was looking for, and our two PhD students, Lindsey and Susan, had phenomenal success tracking down their respective queries, Polystichum (Dryopteridaceae) and Goniopteris (Thelypteridaceae). Having a trip focused largely on these two groups was a great opportunity to compare and contrast two groups with similar evolutionary histories played out in different habitat types. The Hispaniolan species of both genera belong to Caribbean-endemic clades of 30-40 species that appear to have undergone a recent radiation in the West Indies, where they are mostly restricted to limestone outcrops and calcareous soils associated with these outcrops. Despite these similar evolutionary trajectories, the taxa rarely grow side-by-side; Polystichum species tend to be restricted to relatively humid microsites in the forest understory where they grow on boulders and talus slopes, whereas most of the Goniopteris species were found on open disturbed roadbanks, where they would typically grow with Christella, Begonia, Lantana, and other "tropical ditch" taxa. Interestingly, many species in both genera proliferate vegetatively via the production of buds on their leaves; perhaps this is an adaptation to promote colonization of a given microsite, considering the high habitat specificity of most species? The richness of plant diversity in the wet forests of the Sierra de Neyba and the Sierra de Baoruco contrasted sharply with the abject poverty in which many people along the Dominican/Haitian border. Despite the abundance of military outposts in the region and active efforts to patrol their extensive border, most of the people living on the Dominican side of the frontier were Haitians. Though some have lived in the Dominican Republic for several generations, most are recent migrants seeking better opportunities in the relatively wealthy Dominican Republic. Most of the people we saw seemed to be working as subsistence farmers or as migrant farm laborers; others seemingly had no employment. Homes along the border are almost uniformly small shelters made from scavenged wood, plastic, and sheet metal; running water and electricity are absent from huge swaths of the region. Antihaitianismo has a long-standing history in the Dominican Republic, and was cultivated to the level of state policy under the Trujillo regime, culminating in the Parsley Massacre in October, 1937. Tensions clearly are still high in the area today, and seem exacerbated by ongoing issues - Dominicans cite the loss of forest to Haitian squatters within Dominican protected areas amongst their principal complaints. Even so, Dominicans and Haitians in the area clearly depend on each other to survive in this isolated area - we even saw a informal international market where Haitians carried crops over the border on mules to sell to Dominican merchants, who loaded the goods on trucks to sell in nearby towns. Following our field trip, we taught a one-day workshop on fern systematics and field identification with students from several universities (mostly the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo). The course was supposed to take place at a reserve about 2 hours from Santo Domingo, but due to a last-minute transportation issue, we changed venues to the national botanical garden, which has a fern pavilion! Twenty eight students participated in the course, and they brought with them an impressive background of knowledge on the local fern flora and general vascular plant taxonomy. We started in the garden with family-level ID in the field and then moved to the herbarium to examine micro-characters (rhizome scales, spore color, leaf venation patterns) under the stereoscope. I was really impressed by the students' enthusiasm and knowledge, and am looking forward to teaching a longer version of the course some time in the future! https://www.westontesto.com/new-page-5 daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626440968219-0EPLOEOS1Q0N28LKUUVI/calpulalpam.jpeg Mexico 2018 - Mexico 2018 In April of this year, we traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, to continue an ongoing project with our colleague Rafael Torres (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), and Alejandra Vasco to catalogue the fern and lycophyte diversity of the Sierra Juárez mountains in Oaxaca, Mexico. Each year, for the past five years, we have spent about a week collecting ferns and lycophytes in forests owned by small Zapotec and Chinantec communities in the Sierra Juarez. Most of our activity has been along MEX 175, the interstate highway that runs from Oaxaca's Pacific coast to the Laguna de Alvarado on the Gulf coast in Veracruz. Heading out of Oaxaca City, this road climbs from the dry central valley, over the frozen summit of Cerro Pelón at 2950 meters elevation, and then descends into wet tropical forest towards the small city of Valle Nacional and eventually the larger city of Tuxtepec. This is the same terrain that was thoroughly botanized by John Mickel and others during the 1980s and 1990s in preparation for the Pteridophyte Flora of Oaxaca, however the region is extraordinarily rich in diversity and we continue to make new discoveries each trip. Through our work, we've documented around 500 species of ferns and lycophytes along this route, found numerous new state records, and described fern hybrids and species new to science. Specimens from these trips are disseminated to herbaria world-wide, and images of the live plants are posted online on a website we maintain, fernsoftheworld.com. On each trip, the support of the communities in which we work is central to our success; we meet with their leaders to obtain permission to work and rely on them for guides, lodging, and food. In turn, we do our best to share our knowledge of the local flora, and are working on developing species checklists and field guides for their communities. On our most recent trip, Michael and I met up in Oaxaca City a day before Rafael was to make the eight-hour drive from Mexico City. While Rafael was en route, we tracked down collecting supplies (50 pounds of old newspaper, rubber boots, and grain sacks to collect into) at Oaxaca's open-air market and loaded up on our favorite local street foods: tlayudas, memelas, and quesadillas. After Rafael arrived, we left the city and headed north into the mountains, following up on a tip we received on our previous trip about the possibility of collecting in San Miguel Yotao, a Zapotec village of approximately 600 inhabitants about six hours northeast of Oaxaca City. We were principally interested in visiting this town because of its proximity to the llano verde, an important collecting locality visited by Henri Galeotti, Karl Hartweg, John Mickel, David Lorence, and other famous botanists over the past 175 years. It is the type locality for dozens of fern species including several taxa that have never been collected elsewhere. Plenty of people know where the llano is, but actually getting there is another story. With some careful planning it should be possible to get there and back in a single day, yet the combination of political tension between adjacent land owners, intentional and unintentional misinformation from locals, and general cartographic mishap have confounded us. Several years of scanning maps, reading now-digitized accounts of 19th century field trips, and long hikes in the surrounding woods had brought us close to the llano, but the rediscovery of what Hartweg described as a "green swampy space in the midst of the woods," along with its limestone outcrops and unusual ferns, has still eluded us. If we were to find the llano verde, a long hike from San Miguel Yotao looked to be our last good option. After a long, slow drive from Oaxaca City that finished with a tense ascent of a muddy, cliff-hugging logging road, we arrived in San Miguel Yotao around 7pm. We asked around to see if the comisariado de tierra communales (village leader responsible for communal land, selected for a term of typically one or two years) was available for us to present ourselves and ask permission to work; we were told to return to the municipal building in an hour. We got dinner at a house where we had eaten while passing through two years before, and returned to the comisariado's office at the agreed time. As the school brass band worked their way through a wandering, free-for-all practice session in the adjacent room, we sat down with the community leaders and explained why we had come: to explore their forest, document the plant diversity, and make some herbarium collections. We would send a checklist of species and a guide to the local ferns once our work was completed. After twenty minutes of discussion centered on our qualifications and research objectives, the comisariado and his two colleagues conferred amongst themselves in Zapotec for a few moments and then gave us the bad news: because of a dispute over property boundaries with a neighboring community, we would only be able to collect along the road into town, not in the forest extending beyond their village toward the llano verde. The news was not altogether unexpected -- tensions about territory appear to be widespread in the Sierra Juárez, and we had heard the same story before at other villages that had withheld the privilege to collect on their land. This was discouraging news – would the llano verde elude us again? Facing the prospect of mediocre roadside collecting and sleeping on a concrete floor (it was already 9 pm), we got back in the truck and headed for the neighboring village of Santo Domingo Cacalotepec, which offered cabins for rent and (possibly) better fern hunting opportunities. We arrived in Cacalotepec twenty minutes later, entering the village through an ancient narrow cobblestone street better suited for the resident burros than for our pickup truck. With some luck and directions from helpful children, we found our way to the center of town. After some searching, we were able to find someone to bring us to the cabins, which were situated in the forest just above the town. As our hosts prepared the cabin for us, we walked around the clearing to get a preview of what ferns might lie in the surrounding forest: Pleopeltis plebeia, Parablechnum falciforme, Sticherus underwoodianus, and Pteridium aquilinum var. feei were all abundant. After that brief survey of our surroundings, we settled in for the night around midnight. We would meet with the comisariado early the next morning. When we arrived in town at 7:30 am, the comisariado, a pleasant but rather serious-looking man named Vicente Vicente, and his committee were already seated in their office. We exchanged pleasantries, took our seats in front of Vicente's desk, and started quite nearly the same conversation that we had the night before in San Miguel Yotao. Things seemed to get off to a poor start when Vicente informed us that we would have to wait until the town had its next monthly meeting before our proposed research could be discussed and voted upon. Sensing that our second rejection in less than a day was impending, we explained that we could only spend that week in the Sierra Juárez and could not wait for a meeting that was still three weeks away. The committee broke off into Zapotec, leaving us to wait in botanical purgatory for a few long minutes. They concluded, and to our surprise, Vicente had changed his mind: not only could we collect ferns on their property--we would be guided on an all-day hike into some of their best forest. While our guide, Abdias Ruíz, prepared himself for our trip, we stopped by the home of a young woman named Claudia, who fed the occasional visitor in her kitchen. For the following four days, we would eat breakfast and dinner with Claudia--she and her playful two-year-old daughter Dani quickly became some of our favorite locals. Our breakfast, like most of our meals during this trip, was typical of rural communities in Oaxaca's Sierra Juárez : eggs, salsa, and black beans, served with giant platter-sized, freshly made corn tortillas and cafe de olla, coffee sweetened with piloncillo (unrefined cane sugar) and cinnamon. Claudia packed us tlayudas, an iconic Oaxacan dish that resembles a tortilla-based flatbread pizza, and we were ready for our day trip with Abdias. Our hike started with a long, steady incline through some of the village's collectively owned coffee plantations before reaching a wet, breezy ridge at about 2200 meters elevation. In this cooler zone, ferns flourished: Blechnum appendiculatum, Elaphoglossum petiolatum and Lophosoria quadripinnata were especially abundant on the sides of the trail in this area. On the trunks of trees we spotted three common species of Pleopeltis: P. mexicana, P. plebeia, and P. rosei. In wetter areas, a small Selaginella (possibly S. sertata) formed extensive colonies on the sides of the trail. We continued on at a fast pace and decided to hold off on collecting until we returned down the same trail later that afternoon. The trail eventually left the forested ridge and began a steep descent through a thicket of Pteridium arachnioideum and a particularly well-armed Rubus. We assumed the area was a grown-over field that had been cleared for grazing, but Abdias informed us that it had been forested until a few years ago, when a severe fire had burned everything to the ground. Looking around, we found some holdovers from before the fire, most notably Polypodium puberulum, a giant terrestrial polypod with, as its name suggests, densely short-hairy leaves. Further down the thicketed slope, we entered secondary forest dominated by large oaks and a sparse understory of Hedyosmum mexicanum and various Miconia species. Ferns were not abundant here, but we did find some nice drought-tolerant species growing along the trail, including Asplenium monanthes, Mildella fallax, Anemia phyllitidis, and Adiantum alan-smithii, a recently described maidenhair that previously was only known from the neighboring state of Chiapas. Several Pleopeltis species, including P. collinsii, P. rosei, and P. angustum var. stenolepis clung to the trunks and branches of oaks here, along with several elaphoglossums. We followed the trail downhill onto a ridge through open forest—the waterfall we were seeking was barely audible, far below us off the left side of the ridge. The papery fronds of Polypodium arcanum draped off the branches of oak trees around us; the narrow, undivided leaves of Elaphoglossum sartorii and Campyloneurum angustifolium arched out of crevices in the boulders that lined the trail. Further ahead, we encountered a dense colony of Blechnum appendiculatum, a common mid-elevation species, along with some plants of Blechnum polypodioides, a closely related species with somewhat narrower leaves that are tapered towards the base. Scattered amongst them were several plants that were intermediate in their leaf shape and cutting to the two aforementioned Blechnum species. These appeared to be the hybrid Blechnum appendiculatum × Blechnum polypodioides, which is known from elsewhere in Mexico and Central America, but has never been formally described. As we approached the waterfall, we passed through a small thicket along a wet cliff face dotted with the peculiar lithophytic bromeliad Fosterella micrantha, whose broad leaves and loose growth form are reminiscent more of a lilioid monocot than of most Bromeliaceae. This species, which is distributed from central Mexico to El Salvador, is the only Fosterella species that can be found outside of South America (the genus is most diverse in Bolivia). In the shaded, humid habitat at the base of the cliff, we found several larger terrestrial ferns that were absent from the drier forest we had passed through earlier: Phanerophlebia remotispora, Tectaria mexicana, Campyloneurum tenuipes, Diplazium lonchophyllum, and Asplenium achilleifolium. We ate lunch on a large boulder just out of the spray of the 30-meter-high waterfall before heading back on the same trail. Our hike back was slow and tiring, both because we were forced to climb the same steep slopes we had descended earlier in the day and because our bags were getting increasingly heavy with collected plants. Our slow pace did allow us to spot some exceptional species that we had missed on our first pass, including Phlegmariurus pithyoides and a giant plant of Dryopteris cinnamomea with leaves more than two meters long. We got back to town as the sun was setting, stopped at Claudia’s house for dinner, and then returned to our cabin to press the plants we had collected—about 100 numbers amongst the three of us. When we arrived in town the following morning for breakfast, we found out that Abdias was already in the cafetales collecting coffee with most of the other town’s inhabitants. Without a guide for the day, we stayed close and collected around our cabin while attending to the material drying in our presses. In addition to weedy species like Christella dentata, Sticherus bifidus and Pleopeltis plebeia, we found some less common ferns, including Sceptridium schaffneri, Sticherus palmatus, and more Dryopteris cinnamomea, which was locally abundant on rocky slopes in the woods. A series of meandering trails through the woods led us to a wet, open clearing of about 100×50 meters with a large patch of tall herbs and shrubs in in the center. We soon realized that the swath of tall plants in the middle of the field was mostly comprised of Osmunda spectabilis (=Osmunda regalis ssp. spectabilis) and Osmundastrum cinnamomeum. Both species are widely distributed in the Americas from Canada to southern South America, but are uncommon throughout the tropical portion of their broad distributions. Floristics accounts suggest these species are particularly rare (or under-collected) in Oaxaca, with only a handful of collections of O. spectabilis and a single collection of O. cinnamomeum reported. Finding hundreds of these plants growing together was not only a pleasant surprise for us, but also helped improve our understanding of fern distributions in the state. A man who was tending to his cattle nearby told us that this wet field was the site of a prehistorical village and is known locally as the laguna encantada. Maybe those same royal ferns grew around that now-lost village hundreds of years ago? On our third day in Santo Domingo Cacalotepec, we met again with Abdias early in the morning, and Claudia packed us another field lunch. Our plan was to hike far into the mountains west of town, toward a large natural spring known as el malacate. This spring is the principal source of water for the village in the dry village below, running through a 10-kilometer-long series of pipes and hoses through the mountains. We started off on a steep trail near our cabin, with the goal of reaching el malacate by lunchtime. Within fifteen minutes of following the village’s water pipeline uphill, it became apparent that the forest here was wetter and cooler than the one we had seen on our hike to the waterfall. Large terrestrial ferns were common here, including Lophosoria quadripinnata, Pteridium aquilinum var. feei, Dryopteris wallichiana, and the ever-present Sticherus bifidus. In open areas, the giant scrambling fronds of Diplopterygium bancroftii arched overhead. The trail continued climbing, and we started to encounter more high-elevation taxa; Polystichum hartwegii, Arachniodes denticulata, and Parablechnum falciforme were abundant along the trail here. We started to see epiphytes typical of cloud forests as well, such as Vittaria graminifolia, Polypodium subpetiolatum, and Asplenium auriculatum. Serpocaulon falcaria was the most abundant fern here, and formed large colonies on the ground and in trees via its long-creeping rhizomes. In areas where a small stream would bisect the trail, we would find others: the giants Marattia weinmanniifolia and Sphaeropteris horrida along with diminutive species like Elaphoglossum muscosum and Asplenium flabellulatum. Among the smaller taxa we encountered was Asplenium insolitum, a rare spleenwort endemic to southern Mexico that otherwise is only known from six collections, including one we had made two years earlier in the nearby town of Capulalpam de Méndez. With its twice-pinnate, lanceolate leaves this species looks similar to the widespread Asplenium adiantum-nigrum, but it most likely closely related to Asplenium solmsii, which is restricted to Guatemala and the neighboring state of Chiapas. After about two hours of walking through this wet forest, the trail began to narrow and led us onto a series of ledges of a large cliff. Judging by the cooler air temperature and the changing flora, we estimated that we had attained an elevation of around 2500 meters at this point. With this increase in elevation, we began to find new ferns clinging to the cliff face and overhanging branches, including Jamesonia hirta, Moranopteris basiattenuata, and Elaphoglossum peltatum. The epiphytic lycophyte Phlegmariurus myrsinites was here too—this species is easy to identify because it is the only Mexican Phlegmariurus with strongly dimorphic fertile and sterile leaves. On shaded rock faces, we found several rare species; most notably a tiny epipetric Elaphoglossum, Dryopteris nubigena, and Ceradenia sacksii. The Ceradenia was described by one of us just last year, and was previously only known from Cerro Pelón, 25km to the northwest. In total we found eleven plants at the new site—a small number, but nonetheless an important range extension for this species. We didn’t realize the importance of the Elaphoglossum find until we tried keying the plant out in John Mickel and Alan Smith’s Pteridophytes of Mexico and found out it was Elaphoglossum leonardii, which was previously known only from the type collection. Unknown to us at the time, John Mickel had visited el malacate in 1970 as part of his studies on Oaxacan ferns and collected this peculiar Elaphoglossum, along with a haul of other interesting ferns. John described the plant as a new species in 1980 and named it for Steven W. Leonard, then-curator of the University of North Carolina’s herbarium and his collecting partner on that trip. The ledge we were on soon flattened out and sloped down to the stream below us: we had arrived at el malacate. We ate our lunch on some boulders in the middle of the stream, and explored the surrounding rocky slopes for some more ferns. We found a few interesting species here, including Athyrium bourgaei, a narrow-leaved member of the Athyrium filix-femina complex that appears to be restricted to Mexico and northern Central America. Despite recent study on Athyrium at a global scale, the relationships of the species in the American tropics remain poorly understood. Satisfied with our finds and mindful that a long hike back lay ahead of us, we decided not to push on further. The hike back was slow and tiring, but we did make some new finds. One of the most exciting was not a fern or lycophyte but a gymnosperm: Podocarpus guatemalensis. Though podocarp diversity is highest in the southern hemisphere, there are some species that make it as far north as Mexico. The plant we found was perhaps 10 meters tall, but this species is known to attain heights of more than 30 meters! Nearby we found another giant--Marattia weinmanniifolia, a common terrestrial fern in wet ravines in Oaxaca. This species has triangular leaves to nearly 3 meters long, and stands out in the forest because of its fleshy texture and blue-green color. With limited room in our collecting bags and no fertile leaves to be found, we left the Marattia behind and continued to the cabin. We arrived as the sun was setting, and returned to Claudia’s for a much-needed meal before we got to work pressing our specimens. Each of us had collected about 25 specimens with several duplicates, so we were busy pressing and labeling specimens late into the night. With our presses full and specimens drying slowly in the wet air of the mountains, we decided we would leave Santo Domingo Cacalotepec the following morning for Calpulalpam de Méndez, a town halfway to Oaxaca where we could finish processing our specimens. The following morning, we went to town one last time to have breakfast and say goodbye to Claudia, Abdias, and Vicente Vicente. Rafael got Vicente’s contact information so we could send a species checklist, and we began the long journey towards Capulalpam. The winding dirt road leading out of Cacalotepec afforded us opportunities to spot some more ferns on the road banks, and we stopped several times to collect. Among our finds were Anemia pastinacaria, Adiantopsis radiata, Diplazium franconis, and several Pityrogramma, including the putative hybrid Pityrogramma calomelanos × Pityrogramma ebenea. The likely hybrid was found growing with P. calomelanos but clearly was not that species; it was intermediate to that species and the less finely divided P. ebenea. Additional morphological study and analysis of DNA sequence data are needed to confirm the identity of this plant, but it is a fun hypothesis! We crossed the bridge over the Río Tanetze and eventually found the main road back towards the central valley. We reached Capulalpam late that afternoon and set up our loaded presses over the portable driers Rafael had brought. With some luck, our specimens would be herbarium-ready by morning, when Rafael was due to drive back to Mexico City. Our work complete, we settled over some tlayudas and beers at a restaurant just down the hill from our hotel. As we do at the close of each of our collecting trips, we started to discuss where we should go next year. We considered the Zoque forest in the tropical lowlands near the Chiapas border and Cerro Zempoaltepetl, Oaxaca’s highest peak, but agreed on a more familiar locality: perhaps the llano verde was worth another shot. https://www.westontesto.com/new-page daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626428497650-ZXN5YO2HNYVR3VZFGP16/_DSC9208a+%282%29.jpg Colombia 2015 - Colombia 2015 In December 2015, I made my first trip to South America. It was a life-changing experience — the people, plants, and culture of northern Colombia made a lasting impression with me, and I’ve been glad to be able to return many times since. During this trip, I went to Páramo del Sol in western Dept. Antioquia with Wilson Rodríguez (to my right in this photo), Eduardo Posada (who took this photo), and Esteban Dominguez. This paramo, which is several hours northwest of Medellín, is relatively well known and has been thoroughly collected, but is home to many unusual lycophytes. These were our primary goals, and we collected lots of interesting specimens, including Phlegmariurus josesantae, an endemic species then unknown to science. https://www.westontesto.com/armenia-nagornokarabakh-2016 daily 0.75 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626431643151-4EWIA3DK7265W80EPOXF/IMG_9605.jpg Armenia & Nagorno-Karabakh 2016 - Armenia & Nagorno-Karabakh 2016 This trip was part-fieldwork, part-birthright. I have family in Armenia that I never had the chance to visit before, so when the opportunity came up to join in on a botanical tour of the country, I couldn't pass it up. Tucked in the Caucasus mountains at the fringes of western Asia, Armenia is nothing if not highlands - most of the country is above 2000 m. Mostly arid except for its densely forested northern third, Armenia's fern flora is depauperate compared to its exceptional representation of flowering plants (Apiaceae, Fabaceae, and Rosaceae struck me as especially rich) but the species were interesting nonetheless. Most of the ferns I encountered were tucked in small crevices in cliffs (Asplenium and Allosorus were abundant) but I found others in forests and alpine meadows: Polystichum, Dryopteris, Equisetum, Polypodium, and Athyrium species were never abundant but widespread nonetheless. In particular, the Dryopteris affinis group was well-represented in the country, and needs revision. I was able to visit the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh during my trip but botanizing was not on the agenda. Because of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the area was (and still is) difficult to explore. Just before my visit, a brief military conflict broke out, in which hundreds on both sides were killed, and tensions were high. The region remains one of the most heavily mined in the world, and following the 2020 conflict, some of the areas that I visited, including the town of Shushi (which was still ruined from the 1990s war) are now controlled by Azerbaijan. A complicated trip for sure, but one of my favorites. I'll be back - someone has to sort out those Dryopteris! https://www.westontesto.com/ecuador-colombia-2018 daily 0.75 2021-07-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/1626957952160-Y03ZXCADVMBMP4E8JPIU/IMG_5669.JPG Ecuador & Colombia 2018 - Ecuador & Colombia 2018 In October of this year, the XII Congreso Latinoamericana de Botánica was held in Quito, Ecuador, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to give a talk in a symposium focused on Neotropical ferns and lycophytes! I had only briefly visited Ecuador previously, so I was thrilled to get the opportunity to explore the country some more and get to see some colleagues from throughout Latin America. The meeting was wonderful – with lots of interesting talks in English, Spanish, and Portuguese; about 1000 participants attended. The fern meetings were really engaging, and covered a broad range of topics, ranging from floristics to ecology to biogeography. It was a great opportunity to catch up with old friends and also to meet with some promising young students from Ecuador and elsewhere in Latin America who have an interest in ferns and lycophytes! In addition, Lorena Endara - the other postdoc on the project I am working on - organized a wonderful symposium that included diverse talks on plants with flagellate sperm (bryophytes, lycophytes, ferns, and gymnosperms). In addition to providing an opportunity for members of our GoFLAG project to tell colleagues what we’ve been up to (and will be up to), the symposium also had space for several researchers from outside of our project to discuss their research on flagellate plants. I had a great time in Quito (good food!) and am really looking forward to the next meeting in Havana, Cuba in 2022! During and right after the meeting, I got the chance to sneak out for a few day trips with friends to the Páramo de Guamaní in the Cayambe-Coca Ecological Reserve, a few hours (by bus) east of Quito. Situated along the northern edge of the Quito-Baeza highway at the pass in the cordillera, this site was spectacular. Starting at around 4100 m elevation and climbing some 300 meters higher, this paramo is loaded with great lycophytes and ferns! Near the edge of the highway, the paramo is quite wet, and we found tremendous Isoetes(Isoetaceae) and a half dozen species of terrestrial Phlegmariurus (Lycopodiaceae) in the Phlegmariurus crassus species group. Heading upslope, there were fewer lycophytes but lots of ferns; several species of the always diverse genus Elaphoglossum crowded rock crevices all along the access road toward a series of radio towers. Below the paramo, we found nice high-elevation forest dominated by Buddleja and Polylepisand then Lauraceae and Melastomataceae as we winded down towards 3500 m elevation. The fern diversity was exceptional here, as well – in addition to Elaphoglossum, we found Asplenium, Polystichum, Campyloneurum, and Melpomene (among others). Also, don’t miss the hot springs at Papallacta! After the meeting and our time in the Cordillera Oriental, I dropped off my collections at the herbarium of the Universidad Técnica de Cotopaxi in Latacunga (2 hours south of Quito) and then headed towards Colombia, with the aim of fulfilling a long-standing collecting goal: to botanize along the Colombian-Ecuadorean border on the flanks of Volcán Chiles. Inspired by an exceptional set of botanical collections made in this region about 30-40 years ago (principally by a group of Danish researchers), I had been planning this collecting trip for the past five years. I had wanted to go during my PhD studies, but was thwarted by permitting issues and second-hand warnings that the region remained unsafe due to the presence of guerrilla groups and drug traffickers. After hearing news of hikers recently summitting Volcán Chiles without incident, I decided to head to the border, get a sense of the current security situation from the locals, and make my decision accordingly. When I arrived in the border town of Tulcán, I asked around and was relieved to hear that the area around the volcano was stable and that I could get there with a short bus ride to the neighboring town of Tufiño, where I could decide to explore the area from either the Colombian or Ecuadorean side (the border straddles ridge leading to the volcano’s summit). I spent the following two days exploring the eastern and southern flanks of the volcano, and had a fantastic time. It is one of just a few areas in Ecuador (the others being the neighboring Reserva El Ángel and Parque Nacional Los Llanganates) where frailejones (Espeletia, Asteraceae) are found, and the paramo is wet (great for ferns) and dotted with lakes and cliffs (also great for ferns). I managed to find a number of ferns and lycophytes I had never seen before, as well as a few taxa that look to be undescribed species. There are hot springs here as well, and the town of Tufiño has developed a nice ecotourism center – if you’re in the area, pay them a visit! Having made it to Volcán Chiles, I crossed the border into Colombia and stayed a few days in the Pasto, the capital city of the southern department of Nariño. While there, I made a few day trips to nearby areas with intact bosque altoandino and managed to make some nice collections, particularly of Phlegmariurus and Elaphoglossum, both of which tend to be well-represented in high elevation Andean forests. I had been planning to visit the Páramo de Bordoncillo (apparently the world’s lowest elevation páramo) to look for the giant clubmoss Phlegmariurus hystrix, but with only three days left until my return flight and a 24 hour bus ride to Medellín ahead of me, I had to leave it for another trip. Upon making it to Medellin, I spent some time working in the herbarium at the Universidad de Antioquia, which has been the principal source of logistic support for our ongoing research in Colombia. Best of all, I got to spent the day with Fernando Giraldo, a world class tree fern expert who is based out of Medellin and works extensively with the HUA herbarium. While in the herbarium, I was able to see collections of several undescribed species of tree ferns that Fernando had collected in various parts of Colombia. Due in large part to his efforts, the number of Cyathea species registered for the country now exceeds 100 and continues to climb as new discoveries are made. More work like that done by Fernando and colleagues is desperately needed to document the biodiversity of this immensely diverse country. https://www.westontesto.com/colombia-2022 daily 0.75 2022-07-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f01ce3590ad927352e44af/f59d0d3a-6e95-46f2-a800-b1aad370ec20/IMG_3346.JPG Colombia 2022 - Colombia 2022 This trip, which was conducted over the course of five weeks in January and February 2022, was the first official expedition of the Ferns of Colombia project. Our focus was the Cordillera Occidental of the Andes, in the departments of Antioquia, Chocó, Risaralda, and Valle del Cauca, at elevations ranging from 1200-3000 meters. We focused our efforts at Serranía de los Paraguas (Chocó & Valle del Cauca), Parque Nacional Natural Tatamá (two sites: Planes de San Rafael and Cerro Montezuma, both in Risaralda), and Peque (Antioquia). For more on this trip, please check out the Ferns of Colombia website!