State of affairs regarding Flora Malesiana: progress in revision work and publication schedule

The last two years I have made an inventory of the Flora Malesiana network and the revision work remaining. In total the network comprises c. 130 contributors working on 90 of the remaining 135 families (see Appendix). From an estimate by specialists on species numbers of vascular plants in Malesia it appears that the Malesian flora is far richer than traditionally assumed, amounting to some 42000. This means that the flora comprises c. 13% of the world flora of vascular plants on c. 2% of the land surface. For the ferns the figure is probably up to 30% of the total number of species. Subsequently, all specialists revising taxa for Flora Malesiana were sent a questionnaire asking information on progress, possible bottlenecks, and the expected date of completion of the manuscript There was a satisfactory response by 86% of the recipients.