Escuela Agrícola Panamericana El Zamorano
Escuela Agricola Panamericana
P.O. Box 93
Tegucigalpa,
Honduras
Dr. George E. Pilz, Director of the Herbarium Paul C. Standley
Email: ['gpilz@zamorano.edu', 'georgepilz@gmail.com']
The herbarium at the Escuela Agricola Panamericana (EAP) was founded in 1943 and has grown to be an important regional collection for all of Mesoamerica. Wilson Popenoe was known as a plant explorer before he became the first Director of the school in Honduras. It is not surprising that he wanted a strong botanical program in his small agricultural school. The first curator, Juvenal Valerio Rodríguez from Costa Rica, developed the herbarium as a complement to the field activities of the students at Zamorano. In the 1940s and 1950s EAP hosted Paul C. Standley, Paul H. Allen, Paul Shank, Louis O. Williams and Antonio Molina R. EAP, during this period, was also a favorite site for temperate botanists to spend a few months in the dry tropics and the herbarium.
The EAP collection was formed and molded in these years to be a truly regional herbarium. Of the specimens that have been digitalized, the proportions by country are as follows: Honduras 40%, Guatemala 14%, Mexico 12%, Costa Rica 11%, El Salvador 8%, Nicaragua 8%, Panama 3%, Belize 1%, and others 3%. The approximately 800 types held at EAP have a very similar distribution.