Douglas Daly, a U.S. expert on Amazonian plants, vividly recalls the collecting trip that he took to Colombia in 1987. Jostling along a rutted track in their Jeep, he and three colleagues ran into a group of nervous men with AK-47s. The guerrillas demanded to know who the intruders were and why they had so much gear. Daly sweated through the grilling, pretending to be Brazilian. He got by but says, "It was a wake-up call. We got out of there and didn't go back." Not for 20 years.Now Daly, the curator of Amazonian botany at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, is going back—again and again. In April, he made his third scientific expedition to Colombia since 2010, collecting 500 plants in 2 weeks, "four or five of which are new to science," Daly says. "That is probably the best haul I've had in that short a time."Colombia is a country of huge biodiversity. It ranks first in the world in number of flowering plants, second in birds, and sixth in mammals, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The twin Andes mountain ranges running north to south carve spectacular transitions between the jungle and the two ocean coasts where species flourish and evolve. Yet the fauna and flora are not as well described as those in neighboring countries. A decades-long civil conflict, pitting guerrillas in remote bases against the government, turned much of the countryside into a no-go zone for science.
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