Janssen, J.

The distribution is presented in 1 km-grids, based on vegetation relevés and digitized data from herbarium specimen, photos, literature and field surveys. Releves date back to 1880.

This report describes a field visit to the Caribbean island of Bonaire aiming at collection of field data on the arid vegetation, which consists largely of dry thorn scrub, cactus scrub and dry tropical forest. Vegetation releves have been amde at 23 sites, among which eight sites that have been surveyed in 1999. Besides 50 short field descriptions have been made as a basis for a land-use map. The report describes how the more than 1000 releves of the Dutch Caribbean islands, which are stored in the vegetation database CACTUS, may be analysed to provide insight in natural processes like vegetation succession and effects of land use, climate change and other factors. Besides, the report contains an advice for the representative Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality on the island about the (better) conservation of sites on the limestone terraces with very well developed woodland.

Powerpoint presentation with findings of a 4 week vegetation fieldvisit on Saba:

• what is vegetation (research)?
• historic findings (1956 and 1999)
• current findings (49 repeated plots, 28 additional plots)
• preliminary results for different zonation belts
  • elfin forest (highest zone)
  • elephants ears scrub
  • transitional forest
  • dry tropical forest
  • grasslands, shrubland and coastal cliffs (lower zone)
• conclusions
  • elfin forest far from 'original'
  • zonation 2,3 and 4: no big changes, some expansion of elephant ears, more forest succesion resulting in more closed vegetation and poorer in bio-diversity
  • invasive species are more abundant in the lower zone: coralita, rubber vine,'india grass' and others

TurboVeg vegetation recordings stored in a SQLLite database (Hennekens and Schaminée, 2001) containing recordings from plot observations. The database contains hundreds of vegetation observations. 

Please contact the DCBD administrator for more information and access.

Below are TurboVeg screenshots from a snapshot of the vegetation observations for Curaçao (including digitized historical observations from Stoffers (1956) and Bokkestijn & Slijkhuis (1987)):