María José Sanín

• PhD Biology
• Professor (Assistant) at Arizona State University

Pollination by deception is assumed as the general rule among pleurothallid orchids. However, considering the exceptional diversity of this group (44 genera and over 5100 species) and the relatively limited number of available studies (pollination ecology has been assessed in only 17 genera), generalized trends about their pollination systems might...

Societal Impact Statement Palms provide vital plant resources and ecosystem services to people across the tropics. To improve conservation guidance, a “health check” of palms in two highly threatened biodiversity hotspots in Colombia and Ecuador was undertaken. Palms are very diverse in these regions, but over one third are threatened with extincti...

Pollination by deception is assumed as the general rule among pleurothallid orchids. However, considering the exceptional diversity of these orchids (44 genera and over 5100 species) and the relatively limited number of available studies (pollination ecology has been assesed in only 17 genera), generalized trends about their pollination systems mig...

Species are seen as the fundamental unit of biotic diversity, and thus their delimitation is crucial for defining measures for diversity assessments and studying evolution. Differences between species have traditionally been associated with variation in morphology. And yet, the discovery of cryptic diversity suggests that the evolution of distinct...

In the paramune regions from the northern Andes, the high Andean-paramo transition belt is diverse, variable, and understudied. The objective of this paper was to analyze 1) the composition, 2) the structure and 3) the physiognomy of the vegetation from this transition belt in the Belmira-Santa Inés paramo based on the Páramos Delimitation Methodol...

Species are seen as the fundamental unit of biotic diversity, and thus their delimitation is crucial for defining measures for diversity assessments and studying evolution. Differences between species have traditionally been associated with variation in morphology. And yet, the discovery of cryptic diversity suggests that the evolution of distinct...

Aim Previous population genetic and phylogeographical studies have shown how generation time and dispersal affect population divergence in the presence of a vicariant barrier. More recently, speciation genomic studies have revealed that selection and recombination can be equally impactful. Here, we test how the interaction of these factors shapes t...

The topographic gradients of the Tropical Andes may have triggered species divergence by different mechanisms. Topography separates species’ geographical ranges and offers climatic heterogeneity, which could potentially foster local adaptation to specific climatic conditions and result in narrowly distributed endemic species. Such a pattern is foun...

Aim In geographically and ecologically heterogeneous landscapes, such as tropical mountains, widely distributed species may be informative proxies for studying landscape and climatic evolution. We explore historical vicariant and dispersal processes that may have determined the genetic structure and variation of a palm species complex living in clo...

Biological dispersal is increasingly seen as a primary driver of speciation across the tropical Andes. Similarly, growing evidence suggests that the Northern Andes cordilleras formed as disconnected segments, at least until the late Miocene. For montane species, this discontinuity can hinder dispersal to the different mountain segments. Hence, unde...

• The protection of ecosystems with high diversity, such as coral reefs, is not an approach that guarantees their conservation. Thus, maintaining connectivity among coral populations over the long term is a strategy that should be adopted in order to protect diversity and ecological processes. Although coral reefs in Colombia are highly diverse, th...

Solitary, dioecious, and mostly endemic to Andean cloud forests, wax palms (Ceroxylon Bonpl. ex DC. spp.) are currently under worrisome conservation status. The establishment of management plans for their dwindling populations rely on detailed biological data, including their reproductive ecology. As in the case of numerous other Neotropical palm t...

The cloud forest of the Andean Region contains a high biodiversity. Unfortunately, human land use has caused most of the forest to become fragmented, negatively impacting many species due to the reduction of and constant change within the local habitat. In Colombia, these fragmentation triggers can include agriculture, livestock, and corridors for...

Forearc basins are highly sensitive to modification in the subduction zones, including changes in parameters such as convergence rate and obliquity, and the nature of the subducting lithosphere (i.e. age, thickness, thermal state, etc.). Therefore, by characterizing their stratigraphic and provenance records, together with the exhumation history of...

Recent field work and the study of new collections have revealed that the Andean palm Aiphanes parvifolia, as interpreted in the most recent monograph of the genus, actually included five species. Three of them, Aiphanes decipiens, Aiphanes gloria and Aiphanes tatama, whose specimens were previously considered as A. parvifolia, are described here a...

The tribe Geonomateae is a widely distributed group of 103 species of Neotropical palms which contains six ecologically important understory or subcanopy genera. Although it has been the focus of many studies, our understanding of the evolutionary history of this group, and in particular of the taxonomically complex genus Geonoma, is far from compl...

The new species Aiphanes suaita, from the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia, is described and illustrated. Previous specimens of this species had been mistaken for Aiphanes simplex, but a molecular phylogeny revealed that it is actually more closely related to Aiphanes leiostachys, from the Central Cordillera, prompting a reexamination of the specimen...

Sex change is a rare event in nature. Animals and plants that change sex during their lifetime are taxonomically and geographically widespread, but comprise a small minority among Policansky (1982) sexual organisms. In dioecious plants, those in which individuals are male or female, sex change is also uncommon and has never been recorded in palms,...

Palms hold some remarkable records, like the largest leaf of the plant kingdom in Raphia regalis (Hallé 1977) and the largest seed in Lodoicea maldivica (Dransfield et al. 2008). In fact, palms include, together with bamboos, the largest of all monocotyledons. The Andean wax palms in the genus Ceroxylon, in particular the Quindío wax palm, C. quind...

Genetic diversity is key in providing the variation needed to face stochastic change. Increased habitat loss alters population size and dynamics posing serious threats to the conservation of wild species. Colombia has undergone massive deforestation over the last century, but harbours extraordinary high species diversity of genus Zamia (Cycadales),...

Given the geographical complexity of the Andes, species distributions hold interesting information regarding the history of isolation and gene flow across geographic barriers and ecological gradients. Moreover, current threats to the region's enormous plant diversity pose an additional challenge to the understanding of these patterns. We explored t...

The tropical Andes are a biodiversity hotspot, partly due to their rich and complex floristic composition. A fundamental question regarding this outstanding biodiversity is what role the Andean orogeny has played in species diversification. Ceroxylon is a genus of endemic Andean palms that stands out in the palm family (Arecaceae) due to its adapta...

Book sponsored by Ministerio de Ambiente and Universidad Nacional de Colombia where conservation priorities with relevant actions are described.

Zamia incognita is distributed within the Magdalena Medio region, in the Antioquia and Santander departments, Colombia. Since 2009 various activities like research, exploration and cultivation have been executed with the aim of obtaining the greatest amount of possible information, in order to elaborate an effective conservation strategy for this s...

This poster describes ongoing work in population genetic of endangered palm species in Colombia

This poster describes ongoing work in population genetic of endangered palm species in Colombia

El noroeste de América del Sur presenta una geografía sumamente compleja, con grandes contrastes y abruptos gradientes ecológicos. Este entorno es particularmente propicio para la diversificación biológica y ecológica, y la familia de las palmeras lo ilustra perfectamente, con 332 especies (142 endémicas) en la zona considerada, conformada por Colo...

Wax palms are an important element of the cloud forests in the tropical Andes. Despite heavy deforestation, the density of adults seems to be similar in deforested pastures as in forests. We aimed to infer the mechanisms responsible for this apparent resilience in pastures and we tested two hypotheses to explain it: 1) adult palms survived in pastu...

We studied the populations of the Quindio Wax Palm ( Ceroxylon quindiuense ) surviving in deforested areas of the upper Cocora Valley, Quindio, Colombia, by comparing photographs taken in October 1988 and December 2012 at the same sites. The seven pairs of images cover an area of ca. 26.4 hectares, corresponding to 7.4% of the deforested area of th...

We studied the populations of the Quindío Wax Palm (Ceroxylon quindiuense) surviving in deforested areas of the upper Cocora Valley, Quindío, Colombia, by comparing photographs taken in October 1988 and December 2012 at the same sites. The seven pairs of images cover an area of ca. 26.4 hectares, corresponding to 7.4% of the deforested area of the...

Palabras clave: conservación, desarrollo socioeconómico, es-pecies emblemáticas, especies paraguas, palmas, reemplazo poblacional, senescencia. Artículo de investigación RESUMEN En este artículo estudiamos las poblaciones de palma de cera del Quindío (Ceroxylon quin-diuense), que sobreviven en áreas deforestadas en el alto valle de Cocora, Quindío,...

The genus Ceroxylon is revised and twelve species are recognized. A total of 228 specimens from 19 herbaria were studied and field work was carried out in four countries. A list of 113 characters was explored in the specimens and described for each species. Additionally, leaf anatomy and pollen morphology (via Scanning Electron Microscopy, SEM) wer...

Se describe e ilustra una nueva especie de Ceroxylon del Perú, C. peruvianum, y se discute el hallazgo de poblaciones disyuntas de C. quindiuense en Perú. A new species of Ceroxylon from Peru, C. peruvianum, is described and illustrated. The finding of disjunctive populations of C. quindiuense in Peru is discussed.

A new species of Ceroxylon from Peru, C. peruvianum, is described and illustrated. The finding of disjunctive populations of C. quindiuense in Peru is discussed (19) (PDF) Novelties in the genus Ceroxylon (Arecaceae) from Peru, with description of a new species. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280635721_Novelties_in_the_g...