How do we know a region is particularly biodiversity rich? Argentine botanist Cleofe Calderon (1929-2007) worked diligently for years to document plant species in Central America and northern South America. In 1976, she re-discovered a species of bamboo in Brazil that hadn't been seen in over 90 years.
Join other digital volunteers to transcribe her personal field notes written during her brief time collecting in Panama in 1971. Your contributions help to make this material more useful to today's scholars and researchers.
How do we know a region is particularly biodiversity rich? Argentine botanist Cleofe Calderon (1929-2007) worked diligently for years to document plant species in Central America and northern South America. In 1976, she re-discovered a species of bamboo in Brazil that hadn't been seen in over 90 years.
Join other digital volunteers to transcribe her personal field notes written during her brief time collecting in Panama in 1971. Your contributions help to make this material more useful to today's scholars and researchers.
Calderon is well known for her rediscovery of Anomochloa marantoidea, a small species of bamboo previously last seen in the late 1840s. She was born on October 26, 1929 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There she studied with Prof. Ing. Lorenzo Parodi, the renowned agrostologist, at the University of Buenos Aires. During a trip to Washington, D.C. in 1961-1962, ?Cleo?, was introduced to Curator of Grasses, Dr. Thomas R. Soderstrom, in the Department of Botany at the U.S. National Herbarium at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. The two began a close collaboration that included field collecting and publishing. She became a prominent botanist specializing in bamboo. With support from the Smithsonian Research Foundation and the Smithsonian?s Office of Systematics and Office of Ecology, the Office of Scientific Affairs of the Organization of American States, and the National Geographic Society, Cleo was able to undertake field work in Central and South America, as well as enjoying time in Europe and India consulting with influential botanists. She collected plant specimens in Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil between 1966 and 1982. Calderon spent the majority of her time doing field work and collecting in Brazil. In 1976, she and her colleagues set out on ten-week journey to study and collect bamboo in the Mata Atlantica of eastern Brazil, an area well-known for being a point of species radiation for this group of plants. It was during this trip that she rediscovered the elusive Anomochloa marantoidea. In 1979, she was in back in Amazonas, Brazil collecting grass specimens. Her last specimens collections were made during a trip to Ecuador and Colombia in 1981-1982.