A Survey of the Campylopus flora of Hawaii

Abstract

The Campylopusflora ofHawaii consists of nine species, six ofthem previously regarded as endemic. Recent taxonomic revisions reveal that several so-called endemic species are synonymous with species widespread in southeast Asia. Campylopus skottsbergii Broth. is synonymous with C. hemitrichius (C. Mill.) Jaeg., which is here treated as a new subspecies of C. schmidii; C. fumarioli C. Miill. is a synonym of C. laxitextus Lac.; and C. boswellii (C. Miill.) Par. is identical with C. crispifolius Bartr. Campylopus hawaiicus also occurs in New Caledonia and Tahiti where it had been described as C. rubricaulis Broth. & Par. This reduces the level of endemism of Campylopus in Hawaii to 30%. Of the nonendemic species, three are widespread in southeast Asia, three have a narrower Indonesian-Malayan range, and one is distributed in Oceania. Thus Hawaii has been colonized by species of Campylopus from southeast Asia. The endemic species show no apparent relation to and cannot be derived from any other ancestral species of Campylopus. Their origin remains therefore doubtful. In the first survey of the bryophyte flora of Ha- waii, Miiller (1896) listed 13 species of Campylopus. Later Miiller added another species of Campylopus to the bryoflora of Hawaii (Miiller & Brotherus 1900) and Brotherus (1927) also added a new species. These 15 species were revised by Bartram (1933) in his Manual of Hawaiian Mosses, which provided the present knowledge of the mosses of Hawaii. Bar- tram reduced the total number of species to ten, seven of them (70%) endemic to the Hawaiian Is-