Welcome to Arboles Tropicales Comunes del Area Maya database

Arboles Tropicales Comunes del Area Maya has been a popular informational and educational Spanish language CD-ROM on the common tropical trees found in the Mayan cultural area of México, Belize, Guatamala and Honduras. It provides the scientific names (the accepted and the synonyms), common names (in various languages), distribution, uses and various botanical details as well as an image-assisted identification aid for almost six hundred species of trees. It was published in 1999 and is currently essentially out-of-print. Only a few copies have not found themselves in the hands of botanists, students and interested individuals around the world.

It was primarily financed by a grant from Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO) of México, the proposal for which was written by Nisao Ogata (currently at the Universidad Veracruzana and Centro de Investigaciones Tropicales). The list of trees was developed by Nisao Ogata with the consult of Arturo Gómez-Pompa (currently retired from University of California, Riverside and active with Centro de Investigaciones Tropicales, also known as CITRO, in Xalapa, Veracruz, México) who had a long-term interest in the compilation of such a list. Arturo Gómez-Pompa was instrumental in obtaining further funding from various other sources to begin the development of the tree list and to allow the CD-ROM project to finish.

It consists of four modules: (1) an interactive database of botanical and social facts about the trees in the list, (2) an image-assisted computer-based identification aid using the Online software of Richard Pankhurst, (3) the explanation of the vegetation types commonly used in México and (4) the credits highlighting the various contributors to the project, including those not listed as authors.

The interactive database is what is available here at this web site. Araceli Aguilar-Meléndez (currently at Universidad Veracruzana) and others compiled the information that was shaped into a relational database by Orlay Edward Plummer. He developed the interface with this relational database for the CD-ROM. He is also the person who has placed this database on the web. The images illustrating the trees were processed into their final form primarily by Roberto Castro-Cortés (currently at the Universidad Veracruzana and CITRO). The herbarium species were scanned by Roberto Castro-Cortés, Nisao Ogata, Araceli Aguilar-Meléndez as well as others. Various people (including David Garrido, Andrew Henderson, Hermilo Quero, Edmundo Cordoba, Hugo Díaz, Manuel Escamilla, Norma I. Hernández, Leonor Jimenez, René Palestina and Elizabeth Ramírez, among others) and institutions, such as the Field Museum, contributed images of both living and dead specimens.

The identification aid is now available on the web on the CITRO web site. The identification Delta-formatted data were developed by Nisao Ogata, Roberto Castro-Cortés, Araceli Aguilar-Meléndez and others. Roberto Castro-Cortés put this data in a format suitable for Internet interaction via the downloadable Windows program INTKEY.

The description of the vegetation types is also available at the CITRO web site. Also there is a Filemaker runtime version of the botanical and cultural database (the data presented here in an Web interactive form).

Only the credits module is missing from the web.

The User Guide

A click or a double click will get you through the never-ending intertwining set of data screens. Only a single click on a yellowish button or an image will suffice to move you on to a following screen. require a double click on a text entry you choose to do the same.