DNA-assisted identification of Caulerpa (Caulerpaceae, Chlorophyta) reduces species richness estimates for the Eastern Tropical Pacific

Grants

Funding Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants to CFG from the Universidad de Costa Rica and Mexican CONACYT, and by the National Science Foundation Biodiversity Surveys and Inventories Grant No. 0743334 awarded to BW. Additional support to BW was provided by the Roger Williams University Foundation to Promote Teaching and Scholarship; CFG and RRR acknowledge the support of SEP CONACYT and PIFI from Mexican government for field and lab work; HV is supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (postdoctoral fellowship). This research is based in part upon work conducted using the Rhode Island Genomics and Sequencing Center which is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (MRI Grant DBI-0215393 and EPSCoR Awards 0554548 & 1004057), the US Department of Agriculture (Grants 2002-34438-12688, 2003-34438-13111 & 2008-34438-19246), and the University of Rhode Island. We thank, J.J. Alvarado Barrientos, A. Franco Campos, M. Prado, J. Aguirre, A. Planas, L. Tyberghein, S. D'Hondt for field and laboratory support, J. Lopez-Calderon for maps elaboration and T. Sauvage for valuable comments on the manuscript and for providing sequences from Japan. This work was possible because of the helpful support of O.L Tejada (Univ. El Salvador), M. Vargas (Univ. Leon Nicaragua), J. Cortes (CIMAR, Univ. Costa Rica), R. Collin and H.M. Guzman (STRI, Panama).