Main | Family List (MO) | Family List (INBio) | Cutting Edge Draft Treatments | Guidelines | Checklist | Citing | Editors The Cutting Edge Volume XXIX, Number 2, April 2022 News and Notes | Leaps and Bounds | Germane Literature | Season's Pick | Global Range Extensions FALLEN HURDLES! We know neither how nor why, but thank the lucky stars that honchos at SINAC have reconsidered and removed the formidable requirements [see this column in The Cutting 29(1), Jan. 2022] for the exchange of loans and gifts between herbaria here and there. Get your material processed quickly before someone decides to throw the switch the other way! MOVEMENTS HERE AND THERE. Manual contributor and USJ herbarium director Mario Blanco informs us that sometime Rubiaceae correspondent Andreas Berger (WU) worked at USJ on 1 April for an hour or so, annotating specimens. He may also have visited CR for the same reason, but for the moment, we are woefully uninformed about comings and goings there, unless we happen to be involved. And that is the case with a recent visit to CR (both branches) and USJ by long-time Clusia-collaborator and correspondent Manuel Luján (K). One of us (BEH) has corresponded with Manuel at least since his time at RSA, when he was working on his Ph.D. dissertation under the direction of Manual contributor Lucinda McDade. Although Manuel (a native of Venezuela) is a former recipient of one of MO's fellowships for Latin American botanists, Hammel had not had the pleasure (and indeed it was; he cooked delicious arepas for us!) of meeting him in person. We spent five rewarding days of total immersion in Clusia; stay tuned for further collaboration along these lines. While at USJ, we learned from colleagues there that friend and Manual contributor Ricardo Kriebel (who we thought had returned indefinitely to Costa Rica and was still here) has taken a job as herbarium technician at CAS. We know that Ricardo has his heart set on finding a botanical career in Costa Rica, but for now such positions are so few and far between (if not already designated well into the future) that even people with the talent and publication record of Ricardo are left pretty much high and dry. Good luck Ricardo, and may this position lead to all good things! AMAUROPELTA ALERT! Recently we have been in contact with one Orlando Alvarez-Fuentes, who had convinced the powers-that-be at IPNI to accept his 2010 Michigan State University Ph.D. dissertation as effectively published, and sought to accomplish the same with resepct to TROPICOS. It turns out that Orlando had proposed many new combinations in Amauropelta (Thelypteridaceae) that were later credited to other authors, in particular, “Salino & T. E. Almeida” [see under “Salino,” this column, in The Cutting Edge 23(1), Jan. 2016]. With Orlando’s earlier versions accepted (by IPNI) as effectively published, all of their subsequent counterparts must become invalid isonyms. Our devil’s advocacy with IPNI kingpin Rafaël Govaerts failed to change any minds on this, and in the end we decided to abide by their decision and modify TROPICOS accordingly. However, we will not be surprised if this story continues to unfold. In truth, the Code is not exactly straightforward on the issue of effective publication of dissertations (and we have often wondered why distribution by UMI or ProQuest should not qualify as such). The fear is that this latest decision will open a Pandora’s Box, because there is little if anything to distinguish Orlando’s dissertation from many hundreds of other (mainly American) dissertations that have traditionally been dismissed as ineffectively published (an ISBN was apparently obtained for Orlando’s dissertation somewhere down the line, but it is not present in the “original printed version,” as required by the Code). In addition to the new combinations, several new taxon names were also published by Orlando (whose IPNI “standard form” is “O. Alvarez”). DEPARTURES. We learned belatedly, and in an accidental manner, that venerable Universidad de Costa Rica biology professor Ricardo Soto Soto (b. 1948) had passed away, at the age of 73, on 24 December 2021. Ricardo was known to us as a serious, responsible, and collegial individual. Although primarily an algologist, he also collected vascular plants (including, not surprisingly, many aquatic spp.), especially on the Península de Osa. Ricardo coordinated the botanical inventory for the governmental “Zona Norte” project (1987–1988), which involved Gerardo Herrera as the principal collector and yielded many new records from the Cordillera de Guanacaste and Llanura de Los Guatusos. His reliable and steady guidance will be sorely missed. In a similar way, we were apprised of the premature death of Miguel Ballestero (b. 1962), at just 59 years of age, on 3 June 2021. Miguel, a park guard in the Braulio Carrillo area, was already an experienced plant collector (focused mainly on Melastomataceae) when, in 2008, he participated in an intrepid orchid-hunting expedition to the remote Cerro Cacho Negro [see The Cutting Edge 15(3): 3, Jul. 2008]. Sadly, his younger (by seven years) brother Víctor Hugo Ballestero, an "acompañante" on some of Miguel's early collections, also passed away recently (on 4 March 2022), so it has been a tragic year for that family.   TOP