STATE OF BIODIVERSITY STUDIES 191 XV. State of biodiversity studies:

Davis et al. (1995) estimated that the Sumatran flora comprises about 10,000 species, more than the Peninsulawith 7,660 species but consideredthat endemism at the species level was much lower, about 12 % compared with 45 % in Peninsular Malaysia. From this, one thing is very clear- the flora of Sumatra is very poorly known compared with that of Peninsular Malaysia for which there are basic floras, Ridley's Flora of the Malay Peninsula (1922-1925), the four-volume Tree Flora of Malaya by Whitmore & Ng (1972-1989), a recently updated checklist (Turner, 1997), as well as monographs for dipterocarps, ferns, orchids, grasses, rattans, etc., and checklists for specific localities and ecosystems, such as Chin's checklist of limestone plants (1977-1983). In contrast, the only flora for Sumatra is that of Miquel (1860-1861), long outdated, there is only a checklist for trees (Whitmore & Tantra, 1986), and very few monographs, for example, for Impatiens (Grey-Wilson, 1989), orchids (Comber, 2001) and Nepenthes (Clarke, 2001). There are no modern and comprehensive checklists for localities, even for na-tional parks. Outstanding from the biodiversity point of view is Laumonier's compre-hensive vegetation survey (Laumonier, 1997). [Editor's note: based on an unpublished thesis (2000) on the Compositae of Sumatra Tjitrosoedirdjo (2001) listed 126('122') species of which 6 are endemic against 61 and 3, resp., in Peninsular Malaysia (Turner, 1997).] With the little we know, how big is the flora of Sumatra likely to be? The number of species recorded from Peninsular Malaysia is 7,660 (Turner, 1997). The number of spe-cies in Sumatra is likely to be much higher based on land area (Sumatra covers 472,610 km 2 compared with PeninsularMalaysia's 131,598km 2) and, while they share many of 1) Based on a paper presented at the 3rd International seminar on tropical rainforest plants and thei