Plant diversity of Kaieteur National Park, Guyana: Using plant data as a tool in conservation and development

Under the auspices of the National Protected Areas System (NPAS), Guyana is developing policies to incorporate conservation and management of its tropical forest. Kaieteur National Park was selected as the first area under this program. Information was needed on plants (and animals) in order to develop any informed conservation or management policy for this unique ecosystem of the Potaro Plateau.; Two 1-hectare plots provided tree diversity data of the riparian forest. The plots showed that the forest had almost twice the number of trees ≥10cm DBH per hectare than the Mora forests of Kwakwani, Guyana or the lowlands of Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The forest of the Potaro Plateau shared only 3% of the species and 6% of the genera with the other sites and was dominated by Fabaceae—Caesalpinioideae. Principal Component Analysis and Correspondence Analysis indicated that the riparian forest of Kaieteur was not homogeneous and there were differences in species composition between the plots.; A plant checklist compiled using museum collection data obtained from numerous general collecting trips and from the plot study contained ca. 1290 species in 131 families with twenty-two species endemic to the park. The list of plant taxa for the area is far from complete as more species are expected from inventories of the newly expanded areas.; Phytogeographical examination of the Kaieteur flora provided insight to its affinities with other regions. Family-level distribution was too broad to be of interest. Distribution patterns at the genus and species-level contained an element from the Roraima sandstone, westward, as well as a lowland element of Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana in the east. Almost half the species were centered on and had an affinity with the Guiana Shield, not the Caribbean or Amazon Basin area as previously believed. In general, at the species level, the Kaieteur flora is distributed ca. 40% over northeastern South America and an additional 55% over the neotropics.; Understanding and identifying important ecosystems and the locations of endemic plant taxa will assist Guyana in formulating a comprehensive management and conservation policy that can be incorporated into the development of Kaieteur National Park.