Tom's program will include new information about quite a few cacti. Here is a list of the species included in his presentation: Coryphantha robbinsorum, Coryphantha vivipara, Coryphantha recurvata, Echinocereus pseudopectinatus, Echinocereus rigidissimus, Echinocereus stoloniferus, Echinocereus scopulorum, Echinocereus lauii, Mammillaria saboae goldi & haudeana and Peniocereus greggii.

Thomas R. Van Devender is the Manager of the Madrean Archipelago Biodiversity Assessment program at Sky Island Alliance. He was the Senior Research Scientist at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum from 1983 to 2009 where he conducted research on a broad range of natural history activities. He has published well over a hundred research publications including journal articles, book chapters, and books on the cacti of Sonora, desert grassland, packrat middens and the paleoecology of the southwestern deserts, and the Sonoran desert tortoise. He is coeditor with Francisco Molina on a book entitled Diversidad Biológica del Estado de Sonora published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Hermosillo, Sonora in 2010. He has a long-term interest in the flora of the Sonoran Desert Region, and has collected over 25,000 herbarium specimens, which are deposited into the herbaria at the University of Arizona (Tucson), Universidad de Sonora (Hermosillo), and many others. In recent years, he has provided photovouchers of cacti to ten herbaria in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. He has surveyed plants in many vegetation types in Sonora. He and his wife Ana Lilia Reina-Guererro have a special interests in the plants of La Frontera, the 100 kilometer zone in northern Sonora just south of the Arizona border, and in the Yécora area in the Sierra Madre Occidental in eastern Sonora. They have studied the ecology of the Chihuahuan Desert night-blooming cereus (Peniocereus greggii var. greggii), the Cochise foxtail cactus (Coryphantha robbinsorum), the false rainbow cactus (Echinocereus pseudopectinatus), the El Trigo hedgehog (E. lauii), and the choyita (Mammillaria saboae var. haudeana).

He has a long-term interest in the flora of the Sonoran Desert Region, and has collected over 25,000 herbarium specimens, many of them deposited into the herbaria at the University of Arizona (Tucson), Universidad de Sonora (Hermosillo), and the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del Noroeste (La Paz, Baja California Sur). He has surveyed local floras in the Sonoran Desert in the Tucson Mountains, Sycamore Canyon, and Ironwood Forest National Monument in Arizona. He has also studied the plants in tropical deciduous forest near Alamos in southern Sonora and Mazatlán in southern Sinaloa, and the pine-oak forests near Yécora in the Sierra Madre Occidental on eastern Sonora. He and his wife Ana Lilia Reina-Guererro have a special interest in the plants of La Frontera, the 100 kilometer zone in northern Sonora just south of the Arizona border, where they have studied the ecology of the Chihuahuan Desert night-blooming cereus (Peniocereus greggii var. greggii), the Cochise foxtail cactus (Coryphantha robbinsorum), and the false rainbow cactus (Echinocereus pseudopectinatus).

Please make sure you have marked your calendar for this program by someone who has spent lots of time attending to various cactus research projects in Arizona as well as Sonora, Mexico. Please also bring a friend or relative who would like to learn more about cacti.