Volume VII Number 1 February 1968 c/o department of botany UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII HONOLULU, HAWAII °68C2 1/ NOTES ON THE FLORA OF FIJI- Albert C. Smith — 2/ This opportunity is taken for a partial report on propress of studies of the flora of Fiji which I have been intermittently conducting for more than 30 years. The reasons why I have not yet produced the definitive book on the subject are doubt- less obvious to any teacher or administrator whose research time is limited. However, progress for the last year or two has been such that I am now assembling a manuscript and can see that completion is a possibility. One should indeed be somewhat diffident about conducting such an extended project in a part of the world that has its own capabilities, and in which one is a periodic foreign visitor. But in 1933> when I first visited Fiji, no other botanists were intensively interested in the flora, and various museums of the United States were extending their studies in the Pacific, At that time there was perhaps an excuse for a North American to undertake a long-term exploration of Fiji and the preparation of a Flora, The situation has now changed, and Fiji has its own reference collections of plants in the Departments of Agriculture and Forestry, It has also had the services of two interested botanists, 3* E, V, Parham and John W. Parham, and of many capable local assi stents, and now it has a published check -list of what plants are known to occur in Fiji (3), My task is thus made easier, and I am seeking to enlarge that publication by adding full descriptions, citation of specimens, bibliographic details, and keys to facilitate indent! fication - in effect to supplement Seemann’s excellent 1/ Abstracted from a lecture, ” Fiji Revisited,” presented at the December 11, 1967, ~~ meeting of the Hawaiian Botanical Society, 2/ Wilder Professor of Botany, University of Hawaii, and retiring President, Hawaiian Botanical Society. Hawaiian Botanical Society Newsletter - page 2 February 1968 but outdated Flora Vitiensis (ii) by a modem work. The existing collections of Fijian plants are not only in Suva, but also in England — at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the British Museum — and in several U. S. institutions, notably the Smithsonian Institution, Harvard, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Bernice P. Bishop Museum. In the course of time I propose to complete study of all these collections and to incorporate such records into my manuscript. To this audience I am certainly not required to justify this type of scientific work. On the practical, level, of course, an inventory of the plants of an area is basic to a knowledge of its natural resources related to agriculture, forestry, medi- cinal plants, ornamentals, etc. I'Ttile such a practical goal is not mine, I nevevihe- less assume that applied scientists and others will find the eventual puKl-j ration useful. From a different viewpoint, any such floristic study adds to our fund of basic knowledge that supports theories of plant dis tad button. Science requires such data from all parts of the world, and especially from tropical regions. The scientist who attempts to understand and explain the distribution of organisms and their evolu- tionary history and mechanisms needs no justification; he is adding something to the sum- total of human culture. That basic scientific research is often highly useful and practical as a by-product, and one can never predict how and when such research will prove of value in any but a cultural sense. In general the plants of a region fall into three groups in reference to their establishment. The first consists of the indigenous plants - those occurring natur- ally and presumably established long before the arrival of man. Many of these in- digenous plants occur nowhere else in the world; these are the endemic plants, which often provide the botanist with the most satisfactory material for conclusions as to evolutionary history and routes of migration. A study of only the indigenous plants of Fiji would, for this region, answer the questions botanists ask about evolutionary and migrational history. A second group consists of the adventive plants - plants that are now established and compete with the native flora, but that were introduced by man either intentionally or unintentionally. Third we have the plants that occur only in cultivation; these are the ornamental plants, the agricultural plants, etc., that presumably would disappear if man did not continually tend them. A Flora of a region, of course, must deal with the indigenous plants; but to be fully useful it should also incorporate discussions of the adventive and the cultivated flora, althoug, such incorporation greatly complicates its preparation. Table 1 will give an idea of the scope of the problem. While further study will cause revision of these figures, they are approximately correct. One sees that, if only the native, indigenous seed plants are studied, there are some 1,280 species involved (infVa-speei fio oategoxues are not under discussion at the moment). This figure may well rise to 1,1*00 or more when field studies and revisions are completed. Incidentally, about 68$ of these species are endemic to Fiji. The indigenous seed plants fall into approximately genera and 119 plant families. If one adds the naturalized, adventive plants, one has to consider an additional 1*92 species, and this introduces an entirely different 21*9 genera. If the cultivated plants are added, another 21*3 species have been so recorded (although this is surely too low a figure), involving an additional 132 genera. In another way, this is to say that adding the naturalized and cultivated plants increases my task by about 1*0$. At the level of genus the compli cations are essentially doubled, as the native flora is basically simpler in its botanical composition than are the adventive and cultivated floras, which come from all parts of the world. Hawaiian Botanical Society Newsletter - page 3 February 1968 We can demonstrate (in Table 2) the problem of coverage in a different way by looking at figures for the largest families of seed plants in Fiji, (incidentally, my remarks deal only with the angiosperms and gymnosperms; the ferns and other cryp- togams I must leave for specialists to study.) Our largest family is the Rubiaceae, which has a total of 17l* species distributed in Ul genera. These are nearly all native species and genera, and most of the species are endemic. At the other extreme, the grass and legume families have comparatively few native plants in Fiji, but their adventive and cultivated elements are extensive and also very complex. Other families summarized further illustrate the problems. A comparison ( Table 3) of the indigenous floras of Fiji and Hawaii is interest; ng. These areas, appi-oximately the same in land area, probably have indigenous floras oi about the same size. Figures for Hawaii are taken from Fosberg* s valuable pai1©*' of l^lj.8 (2), although an upward revision at the generic level has been indicated by van Balgooy (1). For statistical purposes Fosberg combined species and varieties, but one may estimate the number of indigenous opermatophy be species in Hawaii as probably between 1,000 and 1,200. But what is especially interesting is that Hawaii has only half as many genera as Fiji, and these genera fall into a greatly reduced number of families. These figures provide us with a comparison between a harmonic and a disharmonic flora. Fiji retains an essentially harmonic flora, such as is characteristic of con- tinental land areas. That is, the basic floristic elements are those to have been anticipated if the archipelago had been a fringing part of a much larger land mass. It has been noted (9) that nearly 23$ of the spermatophyte genera with indigenous species in Fiji extend no farther eastward. On the contrary, truly oceanic archi- pelagoes like Hawaii have strongly disharmonic floras, in which the number of basic floristic elements is greatly reduced. A disharmonic biota lacks some elements because of their poor dispersal capacity. In general, the more remote an archipelago is from major land masses, and the more extreme its isolation, the more disharmonic its biota. The ancestors of the plants and animals of such an archipelago arrived there largely by chance dispersal, by a so-called "sweepstakes" route. Upon arrival they found many ecological niches unoccupied and so radiated in bursts of evolutionary activity. A disharmonic biota often has a much higher percentage of specific and generic endemism than a harmonic biota, even though basically (in number of ancestral elements) it is comparatively impoverished. In con tj nuation, the speaker showed kodachromes of Fijian plants, discussing changes in the landscape and vegetation that he had noted over a period of successive visits. REFERENCES 1. Balgooy, M. M. J. van. Preliminai-y plant-geographical analysis of the Pacific. Blumea 10: 389 - 1*30. i960. 2. Fosberg, F. R. Derivation of the flora of the Hawaiian Islands. In: Zimmerman, E. C. Insects of Hawaii 1: 107 - 119. 191*8. 3. Parham, J. W. Plants of the Fiji Islands. 393 pp. Suva, 1 96I*. U. Seemann, B. Flora Vitiensis. 1*93 pp. London, 1869 - 1873. 9. Smith, A. C. Phanerogam genera with distributions teminating in Fiji. J. Arnold Arb. 36: 273 - 292. 1999. Table 1 SPEHMA TOPH YTE FLORA OF FUJI FAMILIES V& WITH INDIGENOUS GENERA 119 WITH ONLY NATURALIZED OR CULTIVATED GENERA 3 6 GENERA 822 WITH INDIGENOUS SPECIES hk$ (INCL. ENDEMIC GENERA) (11) NATURALIZED (or NAT. and CULT.) 2b 6 IN CULTIVATION ONLY 132 SPECIES 2,01* INDIGENOUS 1, 280 (INCL. ENDEMIC) (8 72) NATURALIZED (or NAT. and CHT.T. ) U92 IN CULTIVATION ONLY 2h3 W) (63.%%) (66.1%) Table 2 LARGEST SPERMA TOPH YTE FAMILIES OF FIJI FAMILIES NUMBER OF GENERA NUMBER OF SPECIES T I (E) N C T I (E) N c RUBIACEAE 1*1 37 (5) 2 2 17l* l6l (136) 5 8 GRAMINEAE 70 17 52 1 171 28 (9) 11*2 1 LEGUMINOSAE 75 23 38 lit 155 39 (16) 80 36 ORCHIDACEAE ho 39 1 122 119 (67) 3 EUPHORRIACEAE 27 20 5 2 90 68 (510 16 6 PAUIAE 20 11 00 9 h9 35 (33) .11* MXRTACEilE 12 8 2 2 hQ 36 (26) 8 1* CYPERACEAE lh 12 2 h6 21* (1*) 22 COMPOSITAE 3h 6 27 1 hi 6 (1) 3h 1 PIPERACEAE 2 2 39 35 (30) 1 3 LAURACEAE 6 5 1 38 36 (3h) 1 I GESNERIACEAE 1 l 36 36 (3h) MYRSINACEAE 6 6 35 35 (31) T - ■fcota 1} I - ■f r»i?i 3 (intOmh' rtjj t;ji« • W — nnln tvi.7 1 Z<>*2 j C - cult.ivat.o > sD or* Os cn ,- t CM fH CM o"\ CSJ c-~ SO *\ > — i f— 1 CO (-) 65. J- _=r Os H H <*} u; o 65 1A H Os 1A H CM O CM H *-D H H co £ — "a H r— *1 -tt CM CO M fx, W « — 1 65 H § S3 H M jgj 0 r-> © fc? , P O p5 o {■i M O o M F^ fe! g nr* 6? jg fS—i M O Cr K J_r , P 0-, C/0 • O • CO f%.n .-4 CO P H 0 Campus Road, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822 OFFICERS PRESIDENT . Dr. Daniel D. Palmer (Physician, Rm. 222, 1^8.1 S. King St.) VICE-PRESIDENT. ..... ,Dr. Douglas friend (Dept, Botany, Univ. Hawaii) SECRETARY Mr. William Sakai (Dept, Botany, Univ, Hawaii) TREASURER.,.,,, Dr, Paul Ekern (Water Resources Research Center, Univ. Hawaii) DIRECTORS ..Dr, A. C. Smith (Wilder Prof, of Botany, Univ, Hawaii) Dr, Richard W, Hartmann (Dept. Horticulture, Univ. Hawaii) 4 THE HAWAIIAN BOTANICAL SOCIETY was founded in I92I4- to "advance tjie science of Botany in all its applications, encourage research in Botany in all its phases,” and "promote the welfare of its members and to develop the spirit of good fellowship and coopera- tion among them.” "Any person interested in the plant life of the Hawaiian Islands is eligible for membership in this Society.” HAWAIIAN BOTANICAL SOCIETY c/o Department of Botany University of Hawaii 21^0 Campus Road Honolulu, Hawaii 96S 22 EDITOR Charles H, Lamoureux (U.H, Botany) THE HAWAIIAN BOTANICAL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER is published in February, April, June, October, and December. It is distributed to all Society members with the purpose of informing them about botanical news and progress in Hawaii and the Pacific. News contributions and articles are welcomed. > LIBRARY U . S . N A ' T 1 0 N A L H USE UM WASHINGTON 25, D. C. 2041 S Please Post