Book Description

Volume I of Wild Fruits from the Amazon depicts the fruits of almost all known Guianan plants covering about 100 families, 546 genera, and over 2,000 species. Moreover, the fruits of a few important edible-fruit producing families that occur in the larger Brazilian Amazon and not in the Guianas are included, such as Lecythidaceae and Myristicaceae (both depicted in colour), and Sapotaceae (depicted in black&white line drawings). Furthermore, besides the fruits of all Amazonian trees of the families Lecythidaceae and Myristicaceae, all fruits that have been cultivated for food and/or spread across the Amazon over the past 11,000 years by now extinct Neolithic Amerindian hunter-gatherers and/or terra preta anthrosol farming peoples, are depicted in colour. The catalogue is restricted to woody plants, i.e. trees and shrubs reaching over 1.5 m in height when fullgrown, lianas, vines, (hemi)-epiphytic climbing shrubs, and (sub)-ligneous epiphytes. Some rare plants too poorly collected or described in literature are omitted. Among the Chlamydospermae, only the family Gnetaceae is treated. The remaining 98 families belong to the Angiospermae. Among the Monocotyledoneae, the families Araceae, Musaceae/Strelitziaceae, Liliaceae, and Arecaceae (Palmae) are included. The remaining 94 families belong to the Dicotyledoneae.Volumes II - VII are treating over one-hundred plant families from the larger lowland Amazonian Basin in alphabetical order, whether or not they belong to the Chlamydospermae or the Angiospermae (Monocotyledoneae or Dicotyledoneae). Each family is headed by a short family description based mainly on the more practicable field characters of leaves, inflorescences, flowers, and fruits. The section Notes includes remarks on habit, secretory systems, and seed dispersal - only when one may generalize on family level. Following a family description, each genus within the family is numbered and mentioned together with the author's name. A genus description is given when more than one species within the genus are described. Each genus is followed by the species in alphabetical order and subnumbered. This facilitates a quick determination of both the number of genera treated within a certain family and the number of species treated within a certain genus. The species name is followed by the author's name according to up-to-date taxonomic literature, while one or more synonyms may be added in brackets. When known to the author, vernacular names used by the most prominent sections of the population, such as Aruak-Amerindian (A), Caraib-Amerindian (C), Surinamese Dutch (SD), Spanish (Sp.), English (E), Brazilian Portuguese (B), Sranan-tongo or Surinamese (S), and Bushland-Creole, Quilombola or Paramaccan (P), have been included. When a fruit species is depicted in Volume I, plate and figure numbers are given in bold. Plates are numbered 1-208; figures are numbered within each plate. The species descriptions as presented in Volumes II - VII usually include four sections, the first word of each section being printed in italics (see example below). The first section gives simple leaf characters as far as they are practicable in the field, using for instance a pair of binoculars. The second section describes main characters of inflorescence, infructescence, (fruiting) calyx, flowering and/or fruiting pedicel. The third section describes, as detailed as possible, external and internal characters of fruit and seed(s). The fourth section, "Notes," gives various remarks that may be useful in the field, such as plant habit, presence of secretory systems, bark features, seed dispersal strategy, phenology, occurrence (based on data from literature, samples examined in the Utrecht Herbarium and INPA - Manaus-AM plant collection, and the internet), habitat and soil type, and geographical distribution within the Guianas and the entire Amazonian lowland region. Vol. VI treats plant families MYRISTICACEAE - ROSACEAE.