Research Area Cuba/Caribbean

The Research Area Cuba/Caribbean represents our largest geographically delimited program. It encompasses the Caribbean Islands, in particular Cuba, and the surrounding regions from Mexico through Central America (El Salvador, Costa Rica) to northernmost South America (Colombia, Guayanas). Through this overarching program, we use exemplar groups of plants, algae (diatoms), and fungi (lichens) to reconstruct the evolution, diversification, and biogeography of these organisms in the Caribbean. Some of the study groups are the plant genera Buxus (Buxaceae), Philodendron (Araceae), and Phyllanthus (Euphorbiaceae), the lichenized genera Cora (Dictyonemataceae) and Sticta (Peltigeraceae), and diatoms of the family Cymbellaceae ...

In Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia, we collaborate in floristic and monographic treatments, as part of the Flora de la República de Cuba, the Funga de la República de Cuba, and the eFloraMex treatments, encompassing plants, lichens, and fungi, and recently also diatoms. These are accompanied by the assembly of checklists and catalogues, based on the joint expertise of our institution and of our collaborating partners, such as the Jardín Botánico Nacional of Cuba in Havanna, the Instituto de Biología de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (IBUNAM) and the Instituto de Ecología (INECOL) in Xalapa, Mexico, the Jardín Botánico La Laguna, El Salvador, the Museo Nacional with the National Herbarium in San José, Costa Rica, as well as the Jardín Botánico de Bogotá and the Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas in Bogotá, Colombia.

The Flora de la República de Cuba is our flagship program. It started in the 1970s in collaboration with the University of Jena and Johannes Bisse and, since the reunification of Germany, is being continued by the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin. The first Flora volume was published in 1998 and volume 28 is expected to be published this year. Several of our Cuban colleagues obtained their PhD or MSc degree in collaboration with the Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum and the Freie Universität Berlin. The program has been generously supported through the years by the Verein der Freunde des Botanischen Gartens und Botanischen Museums Berlin-Dahlem e.V. and currently counts with a grant from the Humboldt Foundation in the Research Group Linkage program.

The Research Area Cuba/Caribbean is an overarching program that closely links to the other research areas, to the department of Biological Collections and to the Centre for Biodiversity Informatics and Integration of Collections data (ZBS) of the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin.