By Scott A. Mori & Carol Gracie, The New York Botanical Garden
The specimen based, illustrated checklists provide lists of species documented with herbarium specimens from the area under consideration. Clicking on the name of a species provides a list of specimens that have been identified as that species. Clicking on the name of the species or on an icon of an image (if an image is present) reveals all information associated with that collection, including images of the herbarium sheet, field images, and a map of where the specimen was collected.
Checklists
Family checklists to the flowering plants of Saba
Common Names
Other than professional botanists, most people know plants by their common names and, thus, one of the easiest ways to find out the scientific name of a plant is to ask a local resident its common name. One can search for the common name and the specimens representing species with that common name will appear.
Most of the common names in our database come from James F. Johnson who accompanied us on our first two expeditions to Saba. We are grateful to James for sharing his considerable knowledge of Saban plants and natural history with us. In addition, we took common names from the plant checklist of the Biological Inventory of Saba web site (Rojer, 1997 onward) and from Folk remedies on a Caribbean island (Nielsen & Schnabel, 2007). We thank Suzanne Nielsen for her participation in our field work and for her many useful suggestions about common names and other natural history topics.
Checklist of Common Names
Learn Saban Plants
In order to help beginning botanists identify the flowering plants of Saba, we have made and will continue to make PowerPoint presentations designed to give the users of this site the information they need to use the keys. The following are now available:
One of the easiest ways to recognize plants is by using flower color. Click on the following link to access the collections of all species of Saban plants with conspicuous red flowers. We will do the same for other flower colors.
- Saban plants with red flowers
- Saban plants with pink flowers
- Saban plants with orange flowers
- Saban plants with blue-purple flowers
- Saban plants with yellow flowers
- Saban plants with green flowers
- Saban plants with brown flowers
- Saban plants with white flowers
Species Pages
We are in the process of making family, generic, and species pages for the flowering plants of Saba available over the Internet. Our goal is to provide information about the accepted names, synonyms, morphology, common names, distribution, phenology, pollination, dispersal, uses, and taxonomic problems available to researchers, conservationists, tourists, and others interested in tropical plants.