american samoa - University of Hawaii at Manoa

'IJpolu, and 'Ta'u as well). The only relevant
publication by Powell was a list of Samoan plant
names (Powell 1868), but there is hardly any
mention of Tutuila in this publication. Pickering
(1 876) often noted island localities in his descrip-
tions of the USEE collections, but many of the
listed specimens are unidentified and it is usually
impossible to correlate the specimens with an island.
Powell's specimens are stored at Kew in London,
where they were sought and listed during an
extensive herbarium search by the author (October
1992).
Another collector is known to have gathered
specimens on Tutuila at about the time-Dr. E.
Graeffe, a Swiss physician who traveled extensively
in the region in the 1860s and 1870s. Unfortunately,
many of his specimens, which are stored principally
at Hamburg, with duplicates at many herbaria, lack
specific localities. Several other collectors visited
Tutuila during the last half of the 19th century, but
their contributions to the flora of Tutuila are minor.
The last collector of the century to visit and
botanize in Samoa was F. Reinecke, who published
the first flora of Samoa (1 896, 1898). Most of his
collection is from Western Samoa, and many of his
Tutuila specimens are unnumbered and lack critical
data. His collection, stored in Berlin, was destroyed
during World War 11, but duplicates are found at
Kew and some other herbaria. Another botanist, K.
Rechinger, visited the island a decade later (in 1905)
and collected a few specimens, but the bulk of his
collcctions, which are stored at Vienna, were made
in Western Samoa (Rechinger 1907-191 5).
The next significant collector in Samoa was W.
A. Setchell, who visited Tutuila in 1920 and
published a flora of the island (Setchell 1924). His
collection, with about 580 numbers, is deposited at
the University of California, Berkeley. He was
followed by D. W. Garber, who collected about 190
specimens (nos. 783-973) from the island in 1924.
Other minor collections from that decade are those
by Eames (1921) with about 30 specimens (nos.
TI-T30), Bryan (1924) with about 68 specimens
(nos. 956-1 0 18, 1375-1379), and Diefenderfer
(1929 and 1930) with about 48 specimens (nos.
1-29, 1-1 9). Their collections are principally stored
at the Bishop Museum.
The next major collection from Tutuila was made
by E. Christophersen in 1929 and 193 1, and were
included in his two publications on the flora of
Samoa (Christophersen 1935, 1938). Christophersen
collected about 407 specimens on Tutuila (nos.
980-1231, 1252-1266, 1807-1830, 3478-3593).
His publications still form the most complete
account of the flora of Samoa. Christophersen was
followed by T. G. Yuncker who worked on Tutuila
in 1939. Although Yuncker published his results
from Manu'a (Yuncker 1945), his Tutuila collection,
numbering about 144 specimens (nos. 9300-9443)
has not been published. The Christophersen and
Yuncker collections are stored at the Bishop
Museum.
The next collections were made during the 1950s
and 1960s, but this information has never been
published. In 1959 A. Wisner collected on the
island, and his unstudied specimens are stored at the
Bishop Museum. In 1965, C. H. Lamoureux and C.
R. Long collected on Tutuila, and their specimens
are stored at the University of Hawai'i. Lamoureux's
collection has about 80 specimens (nos. 3000-3029,
305 1-3099) and Long's about 200 (nos. 1892-1997,
2595-2609,3045-3 120).
The original botanist on the study of American
Samoa by Amerson et al. (1 982), J. Kuruc, collected
a number of specimens on Tutuila in 1975, but
except for a few, these are without any data and
most are not even mounted. The largest collection
of Tutuila specimens was made by the present
author from 1972 to 1993. The collection numbers
about 131 1 specimens (nos. 300-33 1, 1286-1289,
1419-1486, 2689-2986, 3109-3124, 3343-3353,
3531-3551, 3601-3673, 3745-3763, 3775-3778,
3836-3857, 8031-8036, 8044-8074, 8393-8524,
8526-8748, 8895-920 1, 9329-938 1). These
specimens are in the author's personal collection,
with many duplicates at the Bishop Museum,
National Tropical Botanical Garden, Kew Garden,
British Museum, and Berlin. Also, a duplicate set of
the collections made during the present study has
been turned over to the National Park Service in
Honolulu. Little of this work has heretofore been
published, other than revisions of two genera
(Whistler 1986, 1988a).
A checklist of the flora of American Samoa,
island by island, was published as an appendix in a