The most active research period on myxomycetes in Costa Rica has taken place in the last three decades. During this time, most of the collections have been carried out and most of the scientific articles have been produced. However, the lack of standard protocols and systematic planning across the country generated a need to conduct an analysis of myxomycete records to define future lines of work. A compilation, cleaning, standardisation and analysis of information associated with a database of more than 7800 records that comprised 242 species of myxomycetes reported in Costa Rica during the last 110 years, was carried out. An interpretation of data with a conservation approach that integrated elements of data-mining and geographical information systems was conducted. Results showed that myxomycetes has been comparatively well studied in Costa Rica in relation to other regional or tropical countries. However, survey effort has been unequal within the territory, leaving some interesting areas or substrates understudied. The absence of long-term goals to study this country and Mesoamerica has limited the potential that the analysed data can have within the context of conservation. This could be the next logical step in the study of this group of microorganisms in that country.

In order to test the hypothesis that elevation may be an important factor accounting for the distribution of myxomycetes in tropical forests, this project was designed and conducted in Costa Rica. Two lower elevational belts were selected for this work due to their floristic and structural resemblance. Using the moist chamber technique, 40 different sites located in four different transects in two different macroclimatic regions were surveyed using three substrates during the rainy and the dry periods of 2014 and 2015. The results showed a lack of differences in diversity-based estimators according to elevation using different approaches and taxonomic differences were found across transects, collecting periods and substrates but not in relation with elevation either. Our results suggest that when increased spatial sampling resolution is implemented and floristic elements are common, elevation may not be as important of a factor in shaping the distribution of myxomycetes in tropical forests as commonly believed.