A Chronology of Middle Missouri Plains Village Sites - CABI

vi • SMITHSONIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO BOTANY
MaP 3. Greater Antilles.
ecosystem (Myers et al., 2000; Mittermeier et al., 2004).
In 2008, Acevedo- Rodríguez and Strong estimated for
the first time the total percentage of endemism exhibited
by the seed plants of this region to be nearly 72%. Additional
years of data refinements and analyses confirm
our original estimates (Table 1), with a slight decrease,
and the figure is closer to 71%. Endemism is tallied by
island in the case of Cuba, Hispaniola, and Jamaica; as
biotic region in the case of Puerto Rico and the Virgin
Islands; or as an archipelago in the case of Bahamas and
the Lesser Antilles.
The West Indies contain a total of 208 families of
seed plants of which only 183 are indigenous to the re-
TabLe 1. Seed Plant Floristic and Endemism Estimates per Archipelago or Island.
(Values in parentheses represent number of endemic taxa.)
gion. There are no endemic families of seed plants in the
West Indies, although in the past, Picrodendraceae and
Goetzeaceae were considered endemic. However, molecular
phylogenetic studies have shown them to be nested within
Euphorbiaceae and Solanaceae, respectively, and therefore
not meriting recognition at the family level. A list of the
ten most species-rich families is presented in Table 3, these
contributing to nearly 60% of the native taxa of the region.
There are a total of 2,034 genera of seed plants reported
for the West Indies, of which 1,474 are considered
indigenous, and 183 endemic (+10 nearly endemic), accounting
for 12.4% of generic endemism (Table 1). The
endemic genera are represented by 950 species, these con-
Percent of Percent of
Number generic Total Native endemic
Island(s) Families of genera endemism taxa taxa taxa
Bahamas 127 507 (0) 0% 1337 1068 (101) 9.4%
Cuba 195 1210 (65) 5.3% 6567 5778 (2980) 51.3%
Hispaniola 185 1102 (31) 2.9% 5430 4433 (1881) 41.9%
Jamaica 164 810 (6) 0.7% 3175 2495 (805) 32.4%
Puerto Rico & VI a 163 792 (1) 0.1% 3243 2108 (292) 13.6%
Lesser Antilles 163 765 (1) 0.1% 2656 1946 (263) 13.8%
West Indies 183 1474 (182) 12.4% 12,200 10,401 (7383) 71%
a VI = Virgin Islands.