Author:
Franklin S. Axelrod

SBM 34
ISSN 0883-1475
ISBN-13: 978-1-889878-33-1

Publication Date: 18 April 2011
Copyright © 2011 Botanical Research Institute of Texas
Specifications: 6.5"×9.5" (pbk), 420 pp.

About the Book

Have you ever wondered where a Puerto Rican plant grows, when it flowers, where it comes from?  Well, here is an annotated checklist of the vascular plants presently found growing in the wild on the island of Puerto Rico that will be an invaluable aid to botanists, ecologists, foresters and any one else interested in the flora of Puerto Rico.  Here you will find the distribution of vascular plants within the island provided according to a novel scheme that incorporates both broad physiographic areas and specific geographical sites.  These are both described in the text and illustrated by three maps.  You will also find useful information on the times of flowering, fruiting, and spore production for each plant and also references for each one to recent monographs on Puerto Rican plants where a fuller description of each can be found.

In the past few years there have been many changes in the names of individual plant taxa (species, subspecies, and varieties) and in the alignment of plant families.  These changes are recorded in this work in such a way that older scientific names as well as Spanish common names can be tracked to new accepted ones.  Since there is much overlap of the Puerto Rican flora with that of other Caribbean islands and areas, these nomenclatural changes will also be of use to researchers working in those areas.

This checklist covers 2909 taxa that are included in 1053 genera and 210 families.  Of these taxa 2335 (80.2%) are native and 574 (19.7%) are exotic; of the native ones, 243 (10.4%) are endemic.

About the Author

Franklin S. Axelrod is currently Collections Manager at the Herbarium of the Biology Department at the University of Puerto Rico – Río Piedras (UPRRP).  He came to Puerto Rico thirty years ago and has been collecting and identifying plants there for the last twenty-five.  He has also collected plants in other islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles.