Small Caribbean islands are wonderful showcases of biodiversity.
Most islands of the Lesser Antilles had access to a similar suite of invading plants, yet differences in geology, topography, climate and human habitation have produced very different floristic effects. Study of these differences can contribute to a better understanding of biodiversity. However, thorough and accurate information on what plants are located on each of these islands is not often readily available. This floristic study of the island of St. Martin will provide, as has the author’s previously published books on Sint Eustatius and Saba, a storehouse of such information.

This book is a synoptic flora whose subject matter is the vascular plants that have been thus far collected on St. Martin, an island in the Caribbean that is shared by two nations, Sint Maarten and Saint Martin. It is intended to meet the needs of botanists, ecologists and others who wish to know which plants are now present on the island, which plants are no longer known to be present, and which plants were, due to misidentification, mistakenly thought to have been present. Although it does not serve, either by botanical key or picture, as a means of identification of the individual taxa of the plant world of St. Martin, it does serve as a guide to the verifiable contents of that world. It is thus meant as an aid to those who have some prior knowledge of vascular plants in the Caribbean.