Flora of the Marquesas Islands
Prologue
Our goal is to provide a flexible query tool to access taxonomic or geographical information on Marquesas vascular plants. Queries result in a simple checklist with island distribution and plant status. The present checklist database consists of 104 families, 364 genera, and 597 taxa of flowering plants and 27 families, 55 genera, and 117 taxa of ferns and related groups. In addition to a checklist, information can be retrieved on specimens that have been collected in the Marquesas, including a list of herbaria where collections are held. Nomenclatural information for Marquesan type specimens will be made available at a later date.
We intend to expand the scope of this online flora to provide the Internet community with the most complete reference on the flora of the Pacific Basin oceanic islands. The floras of the Hawaiian Islands and Micronesia are already available.
Site development
The Marquesas flora online presentation was based on the Hawaiian flora Web site, conceptualized by the joint efforts of Warren L. Wagner, Ellen Farr, and Sylvia Stone Orli. The Web site was developed by Sylvia and Denise Mix.
Data are maintained by Warren L. Wagner and David H. Lorence. Nancy Khan, Tim Flynn and Liloa Dunn contribute to data-gathering and verification of information. Vernacular names were provided by Liloa Dunn. Jessica Braun processed photographic images for web presentation and helped maintain the image database, with additional help from Julia Mirabella and Philip Garcia. Royce Oliver, Michael Sisson, Sara Hodapp and Robynn Shannon processed specimens and contributed to initial database development and maintenance. National Tropical Botanical Garden staff, Tim Flynn and Melany Chapin, developed and maintain the NTBG database which has been incorporated with the Smithsonian database presented here. Please see the expedition pages under Project Description for a list of additional project personnel and collaborators.
Information Sources
This site is one component of the Flora of the Marquesas Project a collaborative project between Warren L. Wagner and David H. Lorence and Smithsonian Institution and National Tropical Botanical Garden. They are collaborating closely with Jacques Florence, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, who is working on the Flore de la Polynésie Française. For more information about the Marquesas flora and vegetation, click here.
The Smithsonian had an earlier Marquesas floristics project conducted by F. Raymond Fosberg and Marie-Hélène Sachet but the project was never completed and only one fascicle of the flora was published covering 11 families (Sachet, M.-H. 1975. Flora of the Marquesas, 1: Ericaceae-Convolvulaceae. Smithsonian Contrib. Bot. 23: i-iii, 1-31) in addition to several preliminary papers. Wagner and Lorence picked up where the project left off, processing and incorporating information from Fosberg and Sachet's collections, and initiating a series of new expeditions to collect and study the flora.
The Checklist and Specimen database tables are works in progress. Identifications are still tentative in many cases. Questions and comments about the site and its content are welcome. Please direct correspondence to Warren Wagner or David Lorence.
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