Florula del Parque Nacional Natural Amacayacu Amazonas, Colombia (MSB 99)
Colombia is remarkable for its extraordinary biological, ethnic, and cultural diversity. In order to maintain these riches the government has established a system of protected parks, including the Amacayacu National Natural Park. This park is situated in the rainforest on a section of the Amazon River on Colombia’s southern border.
The Flórula del Parque Nacional Natural Amacayacu, Amazonas, Colombia, the ninety-ninth Monograph in Systematic Botany from the Missouri Botanical Garden, documents the vascular plants of the park, presenting detailed information about them in simple yet precise language, together with illustrations of representative species. All of this is made possible by intensive botanical fieldwork begun in 1991, followed by years of identification and compilation by scientists from around the world. The Flórula de las Reservas Biológicas de Iquitos, Perú (MSB 63), published by the Garden in 1997, similarly documents a preserve in a nearby region of Amazonian Peru. One surprising result of this work is the discovery that more than a fourth of the species of Amacayacu National Natural Park do not occur in Iquitos. Thus these two floras are complementary works, contributing to our knowledge of the flora of the upper Amazon basin.
In this volume, introductory material, in both English and Spanish, describes the site and presents a floristic analysis. The rest of the book, entirely in Spanish, contains a general key to families of seed plants, keys and descriptions of all genera and species, information on the habit and citation of representative specimens for each species, as well as a glossary to the botanical terms used.
