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The Flora and Vegetation of Easter Island: Past and Present

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The Prehistory of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Part of the book series: Developments in Paleoenvironmental Research ((DPER,volume 22))

Abstract

The floristic inventory of a region can be divided into two groups based on immigration history: native species that evolved in situ or arrived via dispersal without human action and introduced species that occur in an area due to human impact (Richardson et al. 2000). Introduced species may have arrived by direct human transport of diaspores or depend on the creation of suitable habitats by humans. For the analysis of biogeographic relationships and the reconstruction of past vegetation, only the native species are of interest. On Easter Island, the identification of native species is challenging, because of the high human impact for a long time, and the resulting high number of introduced species and putatively extinct native species in the present-day flora. Palynological and archeological studies can provide direct evidence of the presence of species before human arrival, yet are often incomplete. In the absence of sufficient direct evidence, analyses of the distribution and ecology of recent species can provide circumstantial evidence for the reconstruction of the native flora and its ecological preferences.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Holger Kreft for providing data about Global Island Biodiversity as well as all data providers to GBIF and the curators of POWO for their effort. Jean-Francois Butaud provided important comments and information. AZ is funded by iDiv via the German Research Foundation (DFG FZT 118), specifically through sDiv, the Synthesis Centre of iDiv. We are thankful to Christopher D. Barratt for linguistic proofreading.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department Botany and molecular Evolution, Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum and Goethe University Frankfurt, Leipzig, Germany

    Georg Zizka

  2. Department of Biology, Philipps-University Marburg, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Alexander Zizka

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  1. Georg Zizka
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  2. Alexander Zizka
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Correspondence to Georg Zizka .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Botanic Institute of Barcelona (IBB), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Barcelona, Spain

    Valentí Rull

  2. Anthropology Faculty, School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA

    Christopher Stevenson

Appendix

Appendix

Table 1 Commented list of putatively native angiosperm, fern and fern allies, mosses, and liverworts species recorded for Easter Island.
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Zizka, G., Zizka, A. (2022). The Flora and Vegetation of Easter Island: Past and Present. In: Rull, V., Stevenson, C. (eds) The Prehistory of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Developments in Paleoenvironmental Research, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91127-0_14

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