Universidade Federal do Acre

Floristics and Economic Botany of Acre, Brazil
Florística e Botânica Econômica do Acre, Brasil

The preliminary checklist presented here is based on 8365 collections identified to species. At this point in our floristic survey of the 153.149 km2 that Acre comprises, we have registered 3273 taxa (including infraspecific taxa); we cannot yet hazard a guess as to the richness of the total flora. Without a doubt, the curve expressing number of species vs. number of collections is still concave.

The checklist is searchable. It is a precursor to a searchable database that will be made available on the Web once gaps in the geographic coordinates have been eliminated. It has been examined for redundancies and orthographic variants (of both species and authors). A large number of taxonomic and nomenclatural synonyms have been detected via correspondence with specialists, herbarium work, taxonomic literature, and other databases and checklists. These synonyms have been dealt with, but undoubtedly quite a few remain. Reports are being sent to a number of taxonomic specialists that include not only a checklist for their groups but also basic information on all the collections for each species, including collector, collector numbers, and localities. The specialists are being asked to proof the checklist. We have sent reports to twelve specialists who work on speciose and frequently collected plant families; together, they can account for 40% of the collections made in the state. Readers are also asked to send us corrections and comments.

The core of the Acre project - and the source of the checklist -- is the specimen-based database, which contains the available information on all botanical collections from the state since Ernst Ule's pioneering expedition in 1901. Botanical exploration took place sporadically between 1901-1989, and the data are widely scattered and in some cases only partially accessible. Since the NYBG/UFAC collaboration began in 1990, the floristic survey has been more centralized and more systematically planned. The database now contains some 14,000 complete (for field data) records and includes the great majority of historical collections. Updates are communicated electronically each semester to UFAC.

During this past year, we have invested our efforts most heavily in organizing and completing the flora database, in order to begin to apply our results to the state zoning project now under way and to prepare this preliminary flora checklist for posting on the Internet. We have been able to enter more than one thousand determinations to species into the data-base in the past twelve months. This does not include several hundred determinations of sterile as well as fertile inventory vouchers that have not been entered. Still, one of the motivations for a proposal now pending with NSF is the urgent need to eliminate much of the remaining identification backlog by providing taxonomic specialists with the specimens, background information, field opportunities, time, and obligation to resolve taxonomic problems in their groups and put names on the plants.

Other progress on the database during the past twelve months included the following:

• We eliminated a large number of redundant records, as well as records from localities discovered to lie outside of Acre in Amazonas state, Bolivia, or Peru.
• We entered several hundred new records. Some of these were data unearthed for collections made by Ule in 1901 or 1910 and by Kuhlmann in 1923, while others were collections that had been backlogged for want of field books.
• We standardized much of the vegetation-cover terminology.
• We reduced the number of collections lacking municipality from several thousand to fewer than one hundred, and this will be reduced to near zero by the end of 1999.
• We obtained the geographic coordinates for more than one thousand records, but there is still a sizeable backlog. Coordinates cannot be determined for many of the older collections with inconclusive locality data. The remaining localities cannot be found on standard maps. To eliminate these, we have secured a visiting fellowship through the SUNY-Albany Brazil Training Program for an UFAC master's student who will come to NYBG in early 2000 bringing numerous GPS readings and copies of more obscure maps of seringais (rubber-tapper holdings) and of other maps only available through the federal colonization and environmental agencies in Acre. The final product of her visit will be a gazetteer of Acre botanical collecting localities.
• With the help of the IAN herbarium staff in Belém, we located records for some 400 collections made by woodsmen based there during the 1970s; the PI will be visiting IAN at their invitation to record identifications and possibly request loans of unidentified material.

Checklist of the Flora and Mycota of Acre, Brazil