Checklist of woody plants of Sulawesi, Indonesia

Sulawesi comprises of about 182,870 km² of land and fewer botanical specimens (about 23 specimens per 100 km², Whitten et al., 1987) have been collected here than in any other major island in Indonesia. This island is up to date botanically poorly explored and according to Van Steenis (1950) about 32,500 specimens of plants were recorded, the number is probably only a rough estimation and certainly in the precomputer era not based on real specimens. Within the framework of STORMA (Stability of Rainforest Margins) we analyzed the vegetation in several plots of one hectare of different land use systems at the Lore Lindu National Park, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Rapidly we were faced with the problem that the identification of the mostly sterile trees would be almost impossible without a sound basic checklist. Because previous hardcopies (Hildebrand, 1950; Soewanda & Tantra, 1973; Whitmore et al., 1989) were either outdated or incomplete (especially for the small diameter trees) we decided to create a new one using data of actual plant specimens housed at the National Herbarium of the Netherlands, Universiteit Leiden branch (with duplicate specimens in several other herbaria like BO, E, K and others), and enter them in the BRAHMS (Botanical Research and Herbarium Management Systems) database developed by Denis Filer, University of Oxford. More than 120 woody families have been screened and the label information of all specimens (c. 13,000) checked and partly analysed. The density index calculated from our figures is very low (7) but for the first time underpinned by hard, retrievable data. As we did not include species — and specimens rich herbaceous families in our calculations (Orchidaceae, Poaceae, Zingiberaceae, ferns, etc.) the much lower collection index can be at least partially explained.