Botanical garden of the Soconusco region and Orchidarium Santo Domingo

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Mexico is considered one of the five megadiverse countries of the world with 12% of global biodiversity (CONABIO, 2017), and the southeast of the country connecting with the Mesoamerican biodiversity hotspot (Mittermeier, 2011). Within that scenario, Soconusco, in the extreme southeast of Mexico, includes one of the national priority regions for terrestrial biodiversity, the Tacaná-Boquerón corridor, which is the second most important region for orchid species richness in Mexico (Solano et al. 2016; Arriaga, 2000). The Soconusco region also coincides with all, or part of three Biosphere Reserves: Volcán Tacaná, La Encrucijada and El Triunfo. The rare, endangered cloud forest ecosystem amounted to approximately 2% of total forest cover in Mexico, but 50% of that area has now been lost to agriculture and human settlements etc. (CONABIO 2010). In Soconusco, the renowned coffee growing region coincided with, and largely replaced the cloud forest that is the preferred ecosystem for a disproportionately high number of orchid species (Kohler et al., 2006). For well over a century, many of those orchids, including several endemic species, coexisted with the traditional, shaded, coffee plantations at middle elevations (800 – 1,600m) (Toledo-Aceves, 2013; Cruz-Angón et al., 2009; Hietz, 2005) but these are now threatened by recent changes that promote full sun coffee, using ‘modern’ dwarf varieties and a range of chemical inputs. These changes rapidly provoke soil erosion, biodiversity depletion and outbreaks of pests and diseases. In most areas, there are now very few or no mature orchid plants to produce seeds for recolonization, and very few trees available for orchids and other epiphytes to colonize. Traditional, shaded coffee plantations were, and could still be, important repositories of the original biodiversity of the cloud forest ecosystem (Moguel and Toledo, 1999), including epiphytic plants (Damon, 2017; Espejo et al., 2005; Solis-Montero et al., 2005). A total of 325 orchid species have been recorded historically for the Soconusco region, however, extensive research, starting in the year 2000, led to the finding of 249 species of which more than 200 are now under cultivation in the collection, some of which are still awaiting identification. Others are monitored in known locations and so far have not been established in the collection, for reasons of climate, habitat, or extreme rarity. For example, a few species grow at such high elevations that they cannot be maintained within either of the two sites currently available. These data suggest that over 80 species are now possibly extinct in the Soconusco region. spa