American Samoa Plants

American Samoa National Park Plants

American Samoa National Parks Plants is an illustrative listing of plants that occur within the Parks - each name is associated with a type by the familiy. The name of the plants appears in some web browser that hold the cursor on the picture. Some of the most important springs of the plants mentioned here come from:

Botanic and ethnobotanic inventories of the National Park of American Samoa. Nationalpark-Resource Study Unit, Tech. Report-#170, Department of Botany, University of Hawai`i, Honolulu, Hawai`i . Botanic stock of the Ta'u unit of the National Park of American Samoa. Nationalpark-Resource Study Unit, Tech. Report-83, Department of Botany, University of Hawai`i, Honolulu, Hawai`i .

Botanic stock of the Tutuila unit of the National Park of American Samoa. Nationalpark-Resource Study Unit, Tech. Rapport #87, Department of Botany, University of Hawai`i, Honolulu, Hawai`i . Please click here to read the Ragone and Lorence review in Adobe Acrobat Reader format. For the Whistler 1992 Annual Review in Adobe Reader format, click here.

For the Whistler 1994 Annual Review in Adobe Reader format, click here. The website was created by the website of the National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring - now publicly available for research at https://irma.nps.gov/App/Species/Search. Figures are from a September 4, 2008 Kalapapapapa National Historical Park Invertebrate Dead Sea Deadly.

American Samoa E-Flora: Seldom plants

At present there are no "threatened or endangered" plants in American Samoa nationwide. It does not mean that no plants in the territory are under threat, it just means that no plants have gone through the tedious listings. Indeed, there are a number of indigenous plants among the 343 or so far indigenous plants whose survival is fragile there or even in the whole wide globe.

An earlier survey of plants in American Samoa was carried out a few years ago (Whistler 1998), but since then practically no work has been done on these plants or on drawing up a list of vulnerable or vulnerable plants for the territory. In the following survey titled "Plants of Concerns in American Samoa", the aim is to identify which plants might need some degree of conservation in the territory in the near term.

Following the work of 1998, the main aim is to register and cartographically record the datasets (i.e. collecting data) of plants classified as "alarming" in the territory of American Samoa in a GIS database. Due to the work carried out in the last five years (of which only a small part was carried out for this survey), the plant of concentrations as they are called here has been revised to mirror changes in the state of the plants (e.g. new uncommon plants are found, other plants are not as seldom as previously assumed).

Of the 109 plants appearing on this Annex A register, 21 (Table 4) were suggested for the next stage to establish whether these plants fulfil conditions that would allow them to be added to the menaced or vulnerable plants or not. Samoa-Samoa is a vulcanic island that runs north-north-west eastwards from Fiji, northwards from Tonga and eastwards from the Cook Islands and Tahiti.

The Samoa region is split into Samoa (here called "independent Samoa" to confuse it with the concept of Samoa, which relates to geographic unity, the archipelago), which is an autonomous state, and American Samoa, which is an uncorporated area of the United States. Located 168-173Â W and 11-15Â S wide, the island includes nine populated volcanoes, Swains Island and the Rose Atoll with a surface area of just over 3100 sqkm.

Savai'i (1820 square kilometres, 1860 metres high) and ufolu (1110 square kilometres, 1100 metres) are the principal separate Samoa archipelagos that make up the west part of the group. Both of these archipelagos make up about 94% of the entire area of the group. The American Samoa, which covers the east end of the Zamoa is made up of five vulcanic islets ('Tutuila, Aunu' u, Ofu, Olosega and Ta' u) and two atols ('Rose' and'Swains').

The most westerly and by far the biggest of the American Samoa isles. About 100 km to the easterly are the three Ofu, Olosega and Ta'u archipelago, which form the group known as Manu'a. Ta'u, the most eastern of the volcanoes, has an area of 39 square kilometres (15 mi2) and a maximal altitude of 960 metres (3150 feet) on the top of Monte Lata.

Ofu and Olosega are much smaller with an area of 5 square km (2 mi2) and 4 square km (1. 6 mi2) and an altitude of 495 meters (1625 ft) and 640 meters (2100 ft) respectively. They are located together in a joint cliff about 10 km western of Ta'u.

Eastwards of Manu'a there is the inhabited Rosenatoll, and 320 km to the N is Swains Island, where a small populace lives. Currently more than 60,000 people live in American Samoa. American Samoaâ??s first set of flowers was created during the unfortunate La Pérouseâ?? export, which ended up on the northern shore of Tutuila in 1787, but the pieces were later destroyed when the vessels and everyone on them left for Melanesia.

In 1838 another Frensh exploration under the leadership of Dumont D'Urville made a second compilation, but little is known about the copies kept in the Paris Museum. Its first important collectors were created in 1839 during the USA Exploring Expledition (USEE) in Samoa.

Unfortunately, the copies were poorly-cured, and errors in the location are not infrequent. Indeed, some examples of Samoan endemics have been mistakenly identified as having been gathered in Tahiti. The correct labelled USEE copies only mention "Samoa" as the place of discovery, so it is not certain on which isles of the island where they were gathered - although there are some references from the publication lists of Pickering (1876) and the work of Gray (1854).

Obviously the next picker who visited Tutuila was Reverend T. Powell, an British botanic enthusiast who was appointed as a missionsary by the London Mission Society around 1850-1885. Unfortunately most of his copies are lacking locations, so it is not possible to identify which ones were gathered on Tutuila and Manu'a and which on the other isles ('Upolu and Savai'i' he is also known to have collected).

Powell's only pertinent work was a Samoan botanical name listing (Powell 1868). It is known that another hobby biologist, Dr. E. Graeffe, a resident of Switzerland who travelled widely in the area in the 1860' and 1870', gathered copies in American Samoa (Tutuila) at about the same age.

Unfortunately, many of his copies, such as those of former gatherers, are missing special locations and some are apparently mislabelled (i.e., some copies gathered in Fiji are marked as originating in Samoa). In the nineteenth and nineteenth centuries, the last florist to work in Samoa was F. Reinecke, who composed the first Samoan flower (1896, 1898).

Unfortunately, some of the examples from American Samoa quoted by Reinecke are mislabelled, as he has gathered some types, which nobody else has gathered there (but which are found in Samoa independent). A number of other tutuila gatherers attended before 1920, but their contribution to the American Samoa plant life is small.

His best-known of these was K. Rechinger, who a ten-year after Reinecke (1905) gathered some copies on Tutuila, but most of his collection was made in Samoa. In 1905 another American Samoa plant expert C. Lloyd came to visit, but the 1934 Lloyd and Aiken reports of his work cited no sample numbers and it is not clear how much of the work applied to American Samoa and not to the Samoa State.

In 1920, W. A. Setchell was the first great American Samoa collectors since the USEE, visiting Tutuila and publishing a plant of the Isle ("Setchell" 1924). It has a total of about 580 numbers, which makes it bigger than the one gathered throughout the entire Uce. Soon thereafter followed D. W. Garber, who between 1921 and 1925 gathered about 578 numbers on Tutuila and in Manu'a.

He never released any of these Samoan works, but most of his collection was performed by Christophersen (1935, 1938) and/or Yuncker (1945). The other smaller American Samoa collection from this century were those of Eames 1921 with about 30 copies, Bryan 1924 with about 68 and Diefenderfer 1929 and 1930 with about 48.

After Setchell's, the next large American Samoa anthology was created in 1929 and 1931 by E. Christophersen (about 407 copies from Tutuila) and was incorporated into his two papers on the Samoan flower, which are still the most comprehensive representation of the archipelago's flower.

Subsequent compilations were made in 1938 by W. and A. Harris (with about 350 copies from Manu'a, mostly weeds) and in 1939 by T. Yuncker (with about 444 copies from Tutuila and Manu'a). Yuncker (1945) included both of Yuncker's Tutuila collection in his Manu'a Fleur.

There are other smaller collection from Ta'u made by Judd, McMullin, Swezey and Schultz, but only a few of them are known. Recent manuscripts were made on Tutuila, among them those of A. Wisner in 1955 (about 163 copies, of which only 2/3 were considered), C. Lamoureux (about 80 copies) in 1965 and C. Long (about 200 copies) in 1965.

In 1975, the American Samoa studies biologist by Amerson et al (1982), J. Kuruc, gathered a number of copies from American Samoa, but most of his botanical studies have been either missing or without dates. A further indefinite sized compilation was made in 1987 by Fr. Cox of Manu'a, but no records other than those in the Meryta species (Cox 1985) were known.

American Samoa's biggest American Samoa library, with almost 2050 numbers, dates from 1972 to 2003. Not much of this work has been released except in two genres (Whistler 1986, 1988a). In addition, two National Park trials of American Samoa (Whistler 1992b, 1994) contain sample numbers with low sample datas.

FloraThe Angiosperms of the Samoan Islands are about a third the size of Fiji, which is only 1140 km to the east, but bigger than any other islands in the islands or archipelagos except Hawaii that have more types but fewer kin.

Botanical diversity is valued at about 540 indigenous plants (Whistler 1992a), two third of which are dicotyls. They are contained in about 283 types in 95 vegetable families. 3. Angiosperma endemicity is thought to be around 30% at the speciation stage, but only one type, Sarcopygme from the Rubiaceae genealogy, is found endemically in the area.

Another 250 or so other types are naturalised or adventitious (Whistler 1988b). Farnflora is thought to be 230 different with a much lower endemicity. Christensen (1943), who himself never gathered anything in Samoa, published the only major book on the herds. Until recently the most voluminous work on flowers was done by Christophersen, who gathered in Samoa in 1929 and 1931, but his work (Christophersen 1935, 1938) is not a real flower, since there are no other taxonomical keys, description and quotations than those of his own collection.

Part of the information on wildlife has been supplemented by newer books and reviews of Pacific species and family. Recently the three major genres, Psychotria, Syzygium and Cyrtandra, were reworked for Samoa (Whistler 1986; Whistler 1998a; Gillett 1973). In Samoa many other genres and family have also been reworked, among them Araliaceae (Smith & Stone 1968), Ascarina (Smith 1976), Clusiaceae (Smith & Darwin 1974), Cunoniaceae (Smith 1952c; Bernardi 1964; Hoogland 1979), Diospyros (Smith 1971b), Elaeocarpus (Smith 1953), Geniostoma (Smith & Stone 1962);

Con 1980), Makropiper (Smith 1975), Meliaceae (Smith 1952b), Metrosideros (Smith 1973b), Myrsinaceae (Smith 1973a), Orchidaceae (Cribb & Whistler 1996), Rutaceae (Smith 1952a) et Terminalia (Smith 1971a). Many of these reviews, however, are obsolete due to recent collection, and since they are widely dispersed in the literary world, most are relatively unavailable, with the exception of those contained in Smith's Fiji Fauna (1979-1996).

American Samoa's indigenous autochthonous vegetation, from Whistler 1980, 1992b, 1994, 1998 and the present work, is now valued at about 343 blooming plants, 135 fern and 9 heronies. They are included in Annex A of the Whistler 1998 Review, with the exception of some supplements since then.

Orchidaceae (65 indigenous species), Rubiaceae (19), Fabaceae (18), Cyperaceae (17), Poaceae (15), Euphorbiaceae (12) and Urticaceae (10) are the biggest blooming family of plants. In Samoa, as already mentioned, the incidence of endemicity is about 30%, but endemicity to American Samoa is only about 1%, i.e. only about 1% (seven or eight species) of the American Samoa plants are indigenous to the territory (see Table 1).

A further 200 types of plants (all angiosperms) were imported into American Samoa and naturalised. A number of them were "deliberate introductions" imported for a specific use ( "food plants" such as breadfruits and taro), while others were "unintentional introductions" accidentally pasted into the clothes or cattle of Polynesians travelers (and have now become "weeds").