Palms of New Guinea

New Guinea is the world’s largest tropical island and a globally significant biodiversity hotspot. Palms dominate the rainforests of New Guinea, from exquisite, forest floor palmlets to graceful canopy giants, and are vital for local people who depend on them for survival.

Palms of New Guinea is the first comprehensive account of these immensely important plants and includes all 250 species, covering their taxonomy, identification, distribution, habitat, conservation status and much more. Richly illustrated throughout with over 650 colour photographs, 250 distribution maps and line drawings for all species prepared by botanical artist Lucy T. Smith. Written by nine scientific experts, this is an essential companion for anyone studying or growing palms from the New Guinea region.

PDFs of the Palms of New Guinea book are provided in this repository in low- and high-resolution versions. An occurrence dataset, which was used to produce the maps in the book, is also included. The occurrence records were derived from a dataset of almost 3,000 verified herbarium specimens. Geolocations, as latitude and longitude, were present on 43% of the herbarium specimens and were retrospectively added to a further 45% using gazetteers, maps, online tools and expert knowledge.