·Atoll Vegetation and Salinity

The great Pacific groups of atolls are such archipelagoes as the Tuamotus, Carolines, Marshalls, Gilberts, the Phoenix-Ellice group, and those scattered clusters and individual islands collectively termed the Pacific Equatorial or Line Islands. The observations forming the basis of this paper were made on visits to all these groups, except the Phoenix-Ellice and Gilberts, as well as to the Austral Islands and to the essentially similar barrier reef islets around various high islands. Atolls are characterized by small floras with few endemic species and a preponderance of widely dispersed strand planes. The plane cover is a strand vegetation which is generally regarded as very uniform and uninteresting. Actually, however, this uniformity exists only in the minds of those who have visited very few