On a recent trip to Costa Rica, I became fascinated with tree ferns. I became interested in learning more about them, but I didn’t have to go far until I found out there taxonomy is a mess and there are no good resources to identify them.
In pursuing this, however, I noticed one species, Alsophila spinulosa, is frequently identified throughout the Neotropics. In research of this species, however, nearly all resources I can find state this to be an Asian species. There’s no mention of the Neotropics at all in any resources I can find on the distribution of this species. I was ready to chock this up to a widespread CV misidentification, but most of the IDs I can find of the species were entered manually, which is suspicious.
Is it possible that this is in fact a widespread introduced species in the Neotropics that is not well documented in English-language literature? Or is this just another CV error I should go through and correct?