Brunei Darussalam is situated on the north-western coast of the island of Borneo, between longitudes 114° 23' and 115° 23' East and latitudes 4° 00' and 5° 05' North. It is bordered by the South China Sea in the north, and on all other sides by the Malaysian state of Sarawak. It is geographically divided into two separate parts, the larger western part comprising three districts, namely, Brunei-Muara, Tutong and Belait Districts, and a smaller eastern part, Temburong District. It has a total land area of approximately 5765 square kilometres (or less than 1% of the whole island of Borneo), and a coastline of some 160 kilometres.
The climate is equatorial, characterised by high temperatures, humidity and rainfall throughout the year. There is no distinct seasonality, but the climate is governed by a low-pressure trough called the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, and the trade winds. The north-east monsoon blows from November to March, and the south-west monsoon from April to October. Average daily temperature is about 28° C, and average annual rainfall about 2800 mm. Relative humidity averages 93%. There are no records of typhoons, earthquakes or severe floods in the country.
Brunei Darussalam is a Malay Sultanate with a low population of about 280,000 people. Endowed with huge reserves of oil and gas, much of the economy is dependent on these resources. There is little logging and the annual log production is about 100,000 cubic metres. As a result, Brunei Darussalam supports large areas of natural forests covering more than 75% of its land area. At least six major natural forest types are known - mangrove, peat swamp, freshwater swamp, kerangas (tropical heath), mixed dipterocarp and montane forest types. These in turn are further classified into some 32 forest subtypes. In this small part of Borneo, most of the Bornean forest types are represented except for those associated with limestone formations and ultramafic rock.
2. Short history of the project
Brunei was perhaps not an obvious choice for a major floristic project. With a high 'collection index' (number of herbarium specimens per square kilometer), the flora of Brunei appeared to be better represented in herbaria than almost any other part of South-east Asia. The relatively high representation is due almost entirely to the efforts of Peter Ashton who, between 1957 and 1960, was employed as Forest Botanist charged with surveying the forests of Brunei to provide baseline data on timber resources. Ashton collected throughout Brunei. His collections, well represented in the Brunei Forest Herbarium, Kew and Leiden, show that the tree flora is a rich one. Ashton concentrated on timber trees. He, at times together with G.H.S. Wood from Sandakan, collected other groups, but much less thoroughly. Representation of the non-timber groups such as palms and aroids included undescribed taxa not recorded for Sarawak, suggesting that the flora might well be very much richer than the herbarium representation indicated. It was this more than anything that suggested that concentrated fieldwork in Brunei would be most rewarding - and this has been amply borne out.
Other significant collectors of this period were B.E. Smythies, J.A.R. Anderson and E.F.W Brünig. This first wave of intensive collecting in Brunei provided the basis for the published Checklist of Brunei Trees by Hasan bin Pukul and P.S. Ashton published in 1964 and reprinted in 1988.
In September 1988 J. and S. Dransfield paid a brief visit to Brunei on their way back to UK from a conference in Australia to meet the Forestry Department staff and to discuss with Dr. Wong Khoon Meng, the newly appointed Forest Botanist, the possibilities for setting up a major collaborative project. Encouraged to proceed further, WKM and JD drafted a letter of agreement to cover a period of five years' collaboration. In 1989 the wording of the letter of agreement was approved by both parties and, although the agreement was not signed ceremonially until the following year, the collaborative field work began in June 1989. The agreement was offically signed by Haji Mohd Yassin bin Ampuan Salleh, Director of Forestry, in the presence of Yang Berhormat Pehin Orang Kaya Setia Pahlawan Dato Seri Setia Awang Haji Abdul Rahman bin Dato Setia Haji Mohd Taib, the Minister for Industry and Primary Resources, and Professor G. Ll. Lucas, Keeper of the Herbarium at Kew.
Since the signing there have been numerous collaborative field trips.Three staff of the botany section of the Forestry Department have received training in herbarium techniques at Kew, all three attending the Kew International Diploma Course in different years, and two of them spending a year each in on-the-job training. Soon a third party, the Biology Department of the Universiti Brunei Darussalam also became involved; Dr. David Edwards and Dr. Kamariah Abu Salim both providing their expertise and hospitality.
In 1991-1992, the University, together with the Royal Geographical Society in London, set up a year-long multidisciplinary expedition at Kuala Belalong in Temburong District and inevitably the Brunei Forestry Department/Royal Botanic Gardens Kew floristic inventory programme became involved to varying degrees with the activities at Kuala Belalong. In 1992 K.M. Wong left the Forestry Department to take up a job in Sabah. He was eventually replaced by Dr. Idris M. Said. In order to cope with the ever increasing amount of material arriving from Brunei, Kew sought extra funding in order to employ assistance in curating and naming the material, and shipping material elsewhere for specialist naming. Brunei Shell Petroleum generously provided the finance to employ Dr. Aaron Davis and Mr Paul Bygrave and to continue to pay an honorarium to Mr. L.L. Forman in his retirement to assist on the project.
3. Distribution of collections
Under the agreement, the first set of all collections are lodged in the Brunei Herbarium (BRUN) with the second set at Kew. This means that for some collections the Kew duplicate is sterile because the only flowers that were collected were retained in BRUN; for unicates, the only set is, of course, in BRUN.Whenever possible, a minimum of five other duplicates were collected for distribution to A, KEP, L, SAN and SAR or, better, enough for other regional herbaria (such as BO, SING and PNH and some herbaria elsewhere) were also collected. Specialists in particular plant groups were also sent duplicates if enough had been collected.The van Niel collections are a special case: these are held at Leiden, occasionally duplicated elsewhere (but not at Kew). We have not yet, in general, seen these but, where they have occurred in determination lists from specialists, they are listed without details (since they have not yet been incorporated into the database).
4. Identification of collections
We have tried to identify all collections to the level of species. However, some could not be so identified and have therefore been listed as indet. because:
a. they have not yet been seen at Kew, being represented only at BRUN or
b. they are sterile (at least at Kew) and as yet impossible to identify; probably identifiable one day, or
c. the group is too 'difficult' and there is no current specialist or
d. they arrived at Kew too late for full identificationWe have not distinguished between these categories. In addition, some collections (in addition to van Niel's) are listed without details because they arrived at Kew (or label data was entered) too late for inclusion in the database without holding up the progress in production of this printed list.
The checklist is printed out from the specimen database, with some editing in word-processing.The database is duplicated in K and BRUN although the linkage is not at present 'live'. It is based on field-labels as captured by an initial sweep through the Herbarium at Kew (and subsequently through BRUN in Brunei) and then by collectors' field notes being typed in a standard format. The details given under each taxon are automatic extracts from this database and for the most part have not been edited.
Some extra points need to be made:
a. There are some inconsistencies in the positioning of information in the correct fields. Field-scoring is therefore also inconsistent although we have tried to correct the most obvious mistakes. We hope that there is nothing actually wrong, but information visible in some of the printed field-notes is still locked away in 'memo' fields or in the wrong text fields. Eventually this information will be retrieved and organised, but we are unwilling to delay the printing of this first version of the Checklist further while we do the work.
b. The label-data have been replaced in the checklist by standard phrases and some rounding-off of fine detail has had to occur. Thus a particular collector may see one of his or her collections listed under a taxon in the checklist and, remembering the plant, be surprised to see the phrase associated with it - e.g. in a patch of really tall forest a 30 m tree may not be in the canopy but it has been scored for canopy/emergent because of the size classes that fit most of the country. This kind of irritation seems inevitable at present; possibly in the future (after fuller development of GIS techniques and improved local knowledge) allowances can be made for the particular site at which the collection was made. Also, field-books in the future can be designed to encourage the recording of more information more consistently, thus minimising the risk of such anomalies. In all cases the collector's original words are still present in the database text-fields and can be retrieved whenever required. Of course, in certain instances (the most obvious being the Dipterocarps), the information given here could be considered a step backwards, since P.S. Ashton in his various accounts of the family gives much more detailed and accurate descriptions - but for the rest which have received no such attention in the literature, this crude approximation is at least a start.
c. Some paragraphs in this list currently contain information mixed from different fields - thus we may appear to consider 'Belait Formation' and 'sandstone' as equivalent. The information is stored in separate fields but in the interests of brevity and manageable page-numbers we have run them together in this printed version.
d. The information given under a taxon is gathered field-by-field (not specimen-by-specimen) from the database and it has not yet been possible to prevent what appear to be contradictions in some taxa represented by several specimens (particularly taxa apparently undemanding in ecological requirements) - such as "ridge tops, seasonally flooded". Also, what is printed is only what has been positively recorded, so the indication that Elaeocarpus mutabilis was collected on a gentle slope does not mean that it never occurs elsewhere, merely that no-one who has collected the species on flat ground has actually noted that fact.
e. Specimens that happen to be types have not been highlighted in any way; it may be possible to do this in later versions.
6. Abbreviations & 'technical' vegetation terms
In this checklist we use the following abbreviations:
LMDF lowland mixed dipterocarp forest
HDF hill dipterocarp forest
MDF mixed dipterocarp forest
Other vegetation types are spelled out in full.