STUDY OF A FLORA - WHO HAS COLLECTED WHAT IN FRENCH-GUIANA SINCE AUBLET

In French Guiana, botanists have collected some 150000 herbarium speci mens since Aublet in 1763. If we take a closer look at the breakdown o f collections by collector and by family, it can be seen that they are not uniform. Half the collections were carried out for a specific pur pose : an inventory of trees within a set locality, the study of a cer tain habitat (inselberg, swamp, humid zones), pharmacological research , taxonomic studies. The other half were general inventories, carried out with no specific purpose in mind. When the collections are broken down according to family it can be seen that not all the taxonomic gro ups are collected in the same way. The chronology of the collections i s also detailed and reveals how collection objectives have varied over the last two centuries.