Dipteryx charapilla

This species was first described as Coumarouna charapilla in 1943 by James Francis Macbride citing as the holotype a sample, JS362, collected in 1935 by the important Peruvian plant collector José M. Lopez Schunke along the river bank of the Río Mazán in Maynas Province, Loreto, Peru.[5][8][9][10] According to the Macbride, the collector Schunke relayed that this tree was known as charapilla by the locals. The word charapilla is a diminutive of the Quechua word charapa, meaning 'turtle', and refers to the shell-like half of an opened bean pod of this tree.[5]

The second example was discovered in Esperança, Amazonas, Brazil, by Walter Adolpho Ducke in 1942, although it was only identified as such in 1985 by de Lima.[11]

Ducke moved the species to the genus Dipteryx in 1949.[12]

In 1975 a herbarium voucher identified as this species was collected along the banks of the Río Nanay in Maynas Province, Peru.[6] It has since been collected in Maynas a number of times.[13][14]

In the most recent monograph on the genus Dipteryx, A Checklist of the Dipterygeae species by the Brazilian researcher Haroldo Cavalcante de Lima in 1989, he synonymised D. charapilla with D. rosea.[15] His taxonomy was accepted by ILDIS (2005)[15] but not noticed or followed by some databases, i.e. the IUCN (1998)[1] or the Catalogue of the Flowering Plants and Gymnosperms of Peru (1993), which was built using the Tropicos database by the Missouri Botanical Garden.[16] By 2010 de Lima had changed his mind and had started to recognise D. charapilla as an independent species again and it was readmitted into the Lista de espécies Flora do Brasil.[17][18]

Since 2014 local botanists from Brazil and Peru have collected many more additional specimens.[2][12][4] The Herbario Herrerense (HH) at the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana in Iquitos, Peru, holds the most specimens at present.[4]

Peru: In Maynas Province, Loreto, Peru, this species is known from three localised populations in the districts of Iquitos (along the Nanay River), San Juan Bautista (El Huayo Arboretum in Puerto Almendras) and Mazán (along the Río Mazán). Aldana et al. report that trees previously identified as D. odorata in Maynas Province, Peru are misidentified, and in actuality are D. charapilla.[4]

Brazil: This species was collected from Amazonas in the early 1940s.[2][11] Although not known in 2014,[12] as of 2019 the distribution of this species has been expanded to the states of Acre and Rondônia in Brazil.[2]

Bolivia: A collection from 1975 of a specimen identified as this species at the herbarium of the Museu Botânico Municipal in Bolivia is attributed to that country in error, as that particular collection is a duplicate of the 1975 collection (number 19865).[6][19][20]

In Brazil this tree has been found in the Amazon rainforest growing on terra firme forest, várzea (inundated forest) and/or shaded tropical rainforest.[2] In Peru it has been found growing in inundated forest along the banks of rivers, and along river banks in general (although this may be an artefact caused due to these being the easiest places to collect plant specimens).[5][6][13]

It has been collected growing at altitudes of 90[13]-125m.[8]

In 1998 Oldfield et al. published a list of tropical tree species whose populations they believed to be threatened by extinction, which was adopted into the IUCN Red List.[21] Likely working from the Tropicos database, they mistakenly believed that the taxon was endemic to the Amazon rainforest in the department of Loreto, Peru,[1][22] and that it was "known only from the type locality".[1] Hence, they decided to set the conservation status for the population of this species as 'vulnerable'.[1] In Brazil, this species has not yet been evaluated by the Centro Nacional de Conservação da Flora.[2] Trees are grown at the Centro de Investigaciones Jenaro Herrera and Puerto Almendras Arboretum in Peru. It is unclear if the population in Iquitos District is protected within the Allpahuayo-Mishana National Reserve.[4]