The Vascular Plants of the Horne and Wallis Islands'

Recent botanical collections by H. S. McKee and Douglas E. Yen, together with the few available records from published papers, have been collated into a checklist of the known vascular plants of the Horne and Wallis Islands. Of 248 species here listed, 170 appear to be indigenous. Many of these are widespread, but 45 of them are limited to the Fijian Region (New Hebrides to Samoa) . Of the four known endemic species, Elatostema yenii St. John and Peperomia fllttmaensis St. John are herewith proposed as new, and a new combination in the fern genus Tbelypteris, by G. Brownlie, is included. THE HORNE AND WALLIS ISLANDS, forming the French Protectorat des Iles Wallis et Futuna, lie to the northeast of Fiji, due west of Samoa, and due east of Rotuma. The Horne Islands include Futuna (with about 25 square miles) and Alofi (with about 11 square miles) , lying some 150 miles northeast of Vanua Levu and about 100 miles southwest of Uvea. Both Futuna and Alofi are high islands with fringing coral reefs; the former attains an elevation of about 760 m in Mt. Puke, and the latter an elevation of about 365 m in Mt. Kolofau. Uvea (or Wallis Island, with about 23 square miles) lies some 186 miles west of Savaii. A barrier reef surrounds the main island, and there are many small islets on and within it. Uvea is comparatively low and level, although there are isolated hills that do not exceed 150 m in height . Good descriptions of the Horne and W allis Islands are to be found in the comprehensive ethnological papers of Burrows (1936, 1937). Our interest in the Horne and Wallis Islands stems from recent botanical collections made there by Dr. H. S. McKee in 1968 and Dr. Douglas E. Yen in 1969. No previous checklist of the flora has been published, although a few botanical specimens from the area have been deposited in European herbaria. In the course of our studies of the McKee and Yen collections we have scanned past publications containing references to the plants of Futuna, 1 Manuscript received June 15, 1970. 2 Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Hon olulu, Hawaii 96818. 3 University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01002. Alofi, and Uvea, and it seems pertinent to bring together the available data on the vascular plants of the area. In the present treatment all the specimens obtained by McKee and Yen are cited, and we also include as many Burrows specimens as could be located in the herbarium of the Bishop Museum. We have also listed several species for which no herbarium vouchers are at hand. These latter records are included on the basis of apparently reliable reports of occurrence; they include food plants and other plants of economic consequence, in such cases as we believe the occurrence to be beyond reasonable doubt. There remain a few plant records mentioned so casually that they cannot satisfactorily be referred to a species, and these are omitted. For instance, the records of melons, beans, beets, and ground-nuts by Cohic (1950), even though their identity might be guessed, are not included. Only the vascular plants are included in this discussion, although both McKee and Yen obtained a few nonvascular cryptogams, which we have not studied. The McKee ferns were identified by Dr. G. Brownlie, of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, N ew Zealand, with whose permission we have included the names in the present paper. The sequence of fern families and genera is that suggested by Brownlie in his work on New Caledonia ferns (1969). There are no gymnosperms in the collections. The angiosperms are arranged in the family sequence of the twelfth edition of A . Engler's Syllab«: der Pflanzenfamilien (Melchior, 1964), with genera and species alphabetically listed. Collectors and observers of plants in the Horne